My little friend

We lost each other like everyone grew up and lost pieces of themselves in their shredded past.

Photo by Kama Tulkibayeva on Unsplash

When I was eight, my family moved to a ward in the city, a new world to a country bumpkin like me. I didn't know how to make friends, so I chose the first table to avoid all contact with others. My little friend talked to me first because we sat next to each other. He was as small as me, and the homeroom teacher put him next to me. It turned out we lived in the same ward, three blocks from each other. I came by his house every noon, and we walked to school together, on a long dirt road with the cool shades of tamarind trees.

One time the teacher asked some questions, and he couldn't answer. He was punished by standing the whole hour that day. Others laughed at him. We walked home quietly, and I suggested we study together before class. But I soon realized he was not lazy. He studied at home every day, but he couldn't memorize things for a long time. I quizzed him before class, and he remembered what we learned, but he would forget all that when the teacher asked some hours later. He said, 'I am sleepy," his eyes looked down on the dirt path as I was frustrated in my own thought.

***
He suggested we walk through the cemetery to visit his mom. I was curious about what his mother did there in the graveyard. "She prays, day and night," he explained. We went to a small hut in the middle of the cemetery. There sat his mom, with red, yellow, and white flags all around her. There were some gods in black faces, some Buddha statues, some Wan Yin Buddha statues. A lot of fruit. Incense smoke was so thick in the hut that we both coughed nonstop. His mother said hello and ignored us to come back to her prayer. We played hide-and-seek among tombstones and returned home when the sky got dark. I asked him if we should ask his mother to come home. "No, she doesn't care," said he.

My neighbors explained to me that a fortune teller told his mother that she would get rich if she paid respect to the gods. She had done that for many years since my friend was a little kid. They said she didn't care for my friend. He got very sick one night. When the nearby neighbors took him to the emergency room, it was already very late. Since then, he had had to carry a bag for his feces and urine.

We lived in a poor era back then. I hadn't heard or seen anything like a urinating bag. I dared not to ask, fearing that he would not talk to me again. He wore baggy blue trousers, with generous space to contain the white bandage and the bag inside. He walked strangely with both feet open on both sides. But beyond that, I didn't think the bag bothered him or anyone around us.

Until one day.

We had weekly physical exercise. That semester the teacher taught us to run. A class of 30 kids ran well. We had the energy to spend. We ran and laughed. But my friend always finished last. He could barely breathe. He ran or walked heavily, miserably to end the round. The boys laughed. He was slower than even the slowest girl. He became an easy target.

I was sitting behind the class one day, avoiding the break time noise, trying to learn the lesson before a test when I heard a scream. His voice. A group of boys were beating him. For fun. At 8, the kids already realized who was weaker or who could be preyed on. They tried to tear his trousers out. They pulled out his urine pipe and bag. He was screaming trying to get it back.

I ran back to the class and grabbed the giant wooden ruler that the teacher often used to punish us. I swung the stick at the back of a big kid. I jumped in front of my friend. I screamed and swore any bad words I could think of. I threatened them to let the homeroom teacher or the principal know. They lost interest when seeing an angry girl so they insulted my friend and left.

My friend covered his white shirt and blue trousers, stained in dirt and liquid. He gathered the pipe and white bandage and didn't let me see the bag. He left. I saw his shoulders shaking.

He took two weeks off. The teacher said he needed to go to the hospital and fix it. The bullying kids were punished, and I was isolated from my classmates because I was angry and scary.

**
When he came back, he felt different. He lost his giant smile and jokes. He walked with me in silence and avoided other classmates. He walked home alone if I was chit-chatting with others. We didn't drift apart, but some invisible wall had grown between us. We stopped studying together before class or spending time at his house. I didn't ask. He didn't explain.

***
Then this handsome friend came along in the second semester of our 3rd grade. He moved to our class from the other class. A head taller than every kid, he was handsome and smart. He always got the highest score on every test. His handwriting was intricating and firmly beautiful. He was a pet student of every teacher.

One noon, he came to us when we were walking home.

"Come visit me. My mother can make us some food," said he.

We were very poor back then, and food was a big deal. Nobody suggested cooking for others' kids. And it was lunch, the important meal of the day. We looked at each other. We didn't want to be called starving kids, but we also didn't want to reject an attractive meal. My friend nodded. So we followed him home.

The handsome friend had a big house with his own room, a huge garden with two hammocks, and an outdoor wooden bed. His mother brought us fried fish, stir-fried morning glory, and the clear soup made with tiny shrimp. We ate full bellies and fell asleep on the hammocks. When we woke up, he suggested we study the lesson tomorrow together because he got bored studying alone.

He explained to us maths and checked our literature lessons. We quizzed each other on science questions and continued playing until sunset.

It became our new norm in the last two years of elementary school. Three of us together. We finished classes and spent the rest of the day at our handsome friend's house. We visited my little friend's mother praying hut. We came back to our old routine of playing hide-and-seek in the cemetery. We harvested the offering fruits for dead people at their tombstones and ate until we couldn't eat anymore.

My little friend seemed not to grow at all. Although we were at the same height when I first met him at 8, he became smaller than me when we reached 11. He was still thin and always came last in the physical exercise. His mother never worked. I never saw his father because he worked two jobs until 11 pm to feed the family.

On the contrary, my handsome friend grew the tallest and most muscular among our 5th-grade peers. Maybe he came to puberty before all of us for his good food. The bully in our school got worse when the kids got taller and stronger. My little friend was then the easiest target.

One time I got sick with dengue fever for a week. When I returned to class, my little friend was on sick leave, and my handsome friend was suspended from school for a week.

"Yeah, the gang tried to snatch the urinating bag and succeeded. They ran around in break time with that bag in hand, like soliciting for some funny goods. The monitor chased them, beat them up, and took the bag back. Some got bloody mouths," a girl sitting next to me explained. The monitor was my handsome friend. He beat five kids to pulp.

That last year of elementary school would hang there in my heart with a emptiness because my little friend never returned to school again. He needed to re-install the urinating bag, which was dangerous when snatched from him. He might have died if he had been infected. Every trip to the hospital in the city was costly. His father couldn't afford the act of his bullying classmates. So the family decided he should stop school all the way.

I came to his house. He lived just three streets from my house. He never answered the door. I went to the cemetery. His mother still sat there and prayed all day. I wanted to scream at her to get out and earn money to care for my friend. But I felt disgusted or hopeless I didn't know, I left her alone in her own world.

My handsome friend suggested we visit my little friend sometimes. Those were the rare occasion he showed up and went play with us on the grass field in the cemetery. And then he retreated into his wooden house, and I couldn't call him out again.

We didn't talk about school anymore. It was about to end, and we would go to secondary school after the summer holiday. We tried to hold onto the fragile connection that kept us together: our physical room of class. Sooner or later, that room of 30 kids would become the past, and we parted our way to our own unknown future.

I have written this essay many times. Every time I wondered when was the last time I met my little friend and how he looked at the time. I couldn't fathom his growing height or body. He was always shorter than me a bit. In my head, all my friends grew and changed. Some got taller. Some got fat. Some grew a beard. Some grew long hair. But he was always small.

My little friend dissolved into the past like the most natural nut grass in the background of our childhood. They faded behind the appealing future and the adventurous mind. They became the mundane existence of my existence. They were nothing and everything. They made my life come true, yet they didn't have a place in the truth of my presence.

My little friend walked with me on the dirt road and jumped from tombstone to tombstone. His white and blurred urinating bag was stuffed inside the baggy trousers. Our days of free lunch at the handsome friend's home.

Our childhood melted into one another's past until the three of us departed from that past. Each lost a piece of the other and couldn't reclaim it back. We lost each other like everyone grew up and lost pieces of themselves in their shredded past.