ONE

“If I were a dead leaf thou mightest hear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O, uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wonderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d vision; I would ne’er have striven
Thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a lead, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

A stray bird came to the window to sing, and then I recalled this poem. The bell rang, so almost everyone got out of the classroom to take a brief break. Figures passed by me, along with their shadows zooming in and out of the shadows cast by the wall. I, as if I were a statue unfinished by Michelangelo, stood still. Though everything was veiled with gold yellow, as shone the late afternoon sun, blank I felt.

TWO

Chen: My Desk-mate

[A Quiz Passed Down to Chen]

Chen torn a corner of the sheet and chewed it.
Chen: It tastes bad.
Benson: What are you doing! Jesus!
Chen: As you see, I’m taking in some nutrition.
Benson: But why are you eating paper?
Chen: It’s environmentally friendly as you can tell.
Benson: Errrrrr, okay, why the heck is paper-eating environmentally friendly?
Chen: Simple. See, when you finish the quiz, you hand it in. Then, after you take it back you throw it away, right?
Benson: Yes, so what then?
Chen: Then the corners of the paper are not used! Several years ago, when I realized this was such a waste, I…
Benson: Hold on a second. Are you saying that you have been eating paper for several years?
Chen: Yes, I have.
Benson: This is unbelievable! Well, do you actually find pleasure in it, you know, eating papers?
Chen: Of course, I do. Here, have a try.

[Chen smiled gently to urge me to do it. I put a piece into my mouth with trembling hands.]

Benson: Ummm. Not that bad.

THREE

At a corner of the playground sat a girl and I. 14th December 2013, I still remember the exact date of that snowy day, when everything glowed in the shallow light of the street lamp.
“I’m cold,” said she.
“It’s not my fault that you failed to catch the school bus,” I replied, zipping my coat to the top. Such a petulant zipper it was, obviously, as I was almost ripping my coat, and stretching my head back to avoid any potential threat of slashing my neck. Then, I turned to look at her.

I don’t know how to describe her facial expression simply. She looked down to the far edge of the flat playground covered with car-traced snow, with a sleepy face perhaps, but I was quite sure that she was not sleepy at all. She looked frozen for a few seconds, but then she squeezed her hands into her sleeves, and sighed.
“What happened?”
“Huh?”
“You just sighed.”
“I’m cold.”
“So?”
She sighed again, as if deliberately, because she took an extraordinarily long and deep breath.
“I thought you would hug me, you know, after I said that I was cold.”
“No, I won’t. It’s cold, as you’ve just said. I want my hands in my sleeves as well.”
But I leaned toward her and kissed her.

FOUR

Everyone was crying. I had no idea why everyone was doing so. But to fit into the atmosphere, I pretended that I was crying with them, so I took out a tissue and covered my eyes. I was a good actor, I thought, because no one asked me why I was not crying.
It was the last day of our middle school, when our English teacher wrote a wordy letter to all of us, and the class representative was reading that letter. To be honest, I hated her, our English teacher, for her always condescending tone of teaching and talking. Yet as far as we knew, she did not even go to graduate school, and she only got a license that certified her for the 4th level of English speaking that every college student nowadays must get in order to graduate. Nevertheless, she had been a teacher for 30 years, and experience was valuable in evaluating a teacher.
However, however, however, I just did not like her.  
At the end of her letter, there was a poem, which went like:
“Only you are gone, my friend,
Please take care of yourselves.
No matter what it is, milk or bread,
you are always my favorite loves.”
Despite the grammar mistakes and the nonsensical meanings of words, many of my classmates shouted “Bravo!” while they blew their noses. Then, there came the applause. Everyone was nodding their heads, expressing their unutterable gratitude for our English teacher. It took five minutes before everyone calmed down.
So I took off the tissue from my face, and saw it was clean still. I put it back to my school bag.
“Did you actually cry?” my desk-mate asked me, “for that kind of teacher?”
“No, I was pretending. But didn’t you just cry, and even applaud, for that nonsense poem?”
“Yes, I did. I was crying and applauding because in the future I will no longer have a chance to hear that s**t.”