living with school time woes

Back when I was in class four, I became friends with a girl in my class, who incidentally also used to ride on my school bus, since we lived in the same locality. Eventually we became good friends, through conversations on the journey back home from school, similar interests and all that.

It was nice because she made those horrendous bus rides more tolerable. For one, I had someone to talk to, and not feel like a complete stranger on the bus like I had the previous year when I was new to the school. Then, besides getting bullied by the seniors I also had the constant urge to throw up since I had motion sickness and the bus was way too crowded. So the claustrophobia did not make things easier. Having someone fun to talk to kept my mind of these things. And of course, if we were getting bullied on the bus, it was better when you werent the only target.

As it turned out a few months later, her family was moving and she showed up in class one day to tell us that she was leaving. I wanted to do something nice, and thought that with a few friends of ours in class, we would write a short letter/ card and give it to her before she left. Since I was one of the closest to her, I decided to write the short letter and I did.

This was class four however, and despite being good at english (for that age, or so I thought), I made a really stupid mistake that I still feel bad about sometimes. I was having trouble with the concept of ‘missing someone’ as it is said in English (this happens with other stange english words as well – described in my previous post) and was confused about how to say it right.

I figured out however as to how things could go totally wrong. We gave her the letter and I was expecting her to feel really nice, that a group of her friends from class did something really sweet for her farewell. What I did not expect of course was her to start bawling her eyes out (trust me, these weren’t tears of joy), and she was really hurt/ angry and said “but I thought we were friends and if you must know, I will definitely miss you a lot”.

I was thoroughly flummoxed and then realised that what I had actually written on the card was “we will not miss you” .. because back then I thought that ‘miss’ could be used to replace ‘forget’. That day was her last day at school and on the bus journey home, she was hurt enough to not sit beside me, or even hear me out (unfortunately, kids have bad tempers).

Suffice to say, that was the end of that friendship. I only saw her once, randomly, many years later, and I’m not sure if she even remembered me (it more likely that she chose to selectively forget the traumatic instances of her childood ). I, however, never made that mistake again.

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