Stuff I have written for school.

MY LIFE IS FOREVER CHANGED! *gasp*

(The homework was "A life changing event." It was supposed to be based off of Great Expectation. It was not, maaaaybe because I had been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality berofehand?)

 

I’m not entirely sure what I had thought before that Wednesday. It is quite possible, no, probable even, that the whole concept had been floating around in my head since springtime. It had taken up roots in my mind, and as the year had grown warmer, it had blossomed into flowering thoughts. Yet it had happened so quickly, and I had had little time to stop and go over every facet of the thing in detail until mid autumn, when it had fallen to the ground like a horse chestnut leaf and my young self had picked it up and wondered.

 

In retrospect, it is odd that I only realised this then; that I had managed to cling to my naïve view of the world for so long. I knew only of clear cut morality, either you were light and good and right, or you were dark and bad and wrong and I didn’t even stop to think if you could have good intentions but go about something in a terrible way, or if you could be rotten to the core yet make everyone believe that you are helping them, when in fact you are not, and I was wrong.

 

It was on an early morning in early October, and the ground was smothered in a blanket of mist. My elder sister and I had been walking to school through the thick fog as it curled around lampposts and enveloped the streets, when on the road ahead of us I had spotted a pigeon, dead, pancaked on the damp tarmac. “Jemma,” I asked my sister tentatively, “Why did the pigeon get itself killed?”

“Maybe the question is not so much as why it got itself killed, but who killed it,” replied Jemma. “Although there is no debate about whether or not it is dead, saying that it got itself killed places the blame for the pigeon’s death on itself. However, pigeons cannot just go around killing themselves, especially when it is obvious that this particular pigeon was run over by a car. I shall reiterate; in this situation it would be better to say not why it got itself killed, but who killed it.” Still struggling to get my head round this, I asked her again. “But Jemma! Who did kill the pigeon‽”

Turning to look back at me from where she had walked ahead, Jemma stared angrily towards the road. “A careless driver with little concern for any life but their own,” she said, and her voice had a chill in it reminiscent of the beginnings of winter.

 

Later that day, a similar premise arose at my school and, inspired by what my sister had said earlier, I approached the situation in a different manner than I would have before that day. Samantha Long had not been in school that morning, and there was a rumour floating about the cold beige corridors that the previous afternoon she had “Gone and got ‘er arm broke by Michael Lewison ,” and that it ”Was ‘er own stupid fault that she’d got ‘urt.”

 

Sitting at the lunch table, I tried to bring up the subject, tried to explain that Samantha (who was a good friend of mine) had not had her arm broken, Michael Lewison had broken it, and there was a difference. Of course, most of the children in the lunch hall struggled with the idea; they had fixed mindsets, and found it difficult to actually change their minds about something, to replace falsified beliefs with new, better ideas. Still trying to explain it to them, it came as a shock when Michael himself came over. Immediately, everyone fell silent, he was the tallest in our class and even if he hadn’t been, he was rumoured to have broken Samantha’s arm just the day before. But he just glared at me. He said nothing, but the threat was hidden in his beady eyes, shut up or I’ll break both your arms, you little maggot.

 

The mist had cleared by the time Jemma and I walked home, now komorebi danced on the ground, and dust devils whirled about our feet. I told Jemma about what had happened at lunch, I asked her if Michael would get in trouble. Most of all I wanted to know why people like the careless driver and Michael Lewison were so cruel, and why nobody ever called people like them out on it. The wind blew softly, and leaves began to drift down from the horse chestnut trees, some of them were crisp and wrinkled and crumbled to dust in my hands, some were yellow shot through with orange and red and still retained a few patches of green, and as one of these fell, I raced forward and caught it. Opening my school bag, I took out a book and carefully pressed the leaf between two pages. “Jemma,” I asked, a final question plaguing my mind. “Why is nothing fair?”

Again she turned, but unlike earlier her stare was not icy and unforgiving, but comforting and warm and she walked over to me and took my smaller hand in her own. “I don’t know. Its just not.”