B-2: Drowning in Tears

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Wonderland 2020

#977465 added March 8, 2020 at 12:25am
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WONDERLAND
B. "The Pool of Tears" | 2. "Drowning in Tears"

Prompt ▼

I grew up in a small town in Northern California, the kind where the kids I went to kindergarten and elementary school with were mostly the same kids I went to middle school and high school with. While there were the inevitable arrivals and departures as families came and went, those of us who stayed in town stayed in school together.

A handful of us made it all the way from kindergarten to high school graduation together. Not always in the exact same classes, and not always as the close friends we were on the playground in those early years, but still at the same school, passing each other in the same halls, having lunch in the same cafeteria, and attending assemblies in the same gym.

One of these girls, K, lived two streets away from me. Our families used to talk a lot, until those awkward junior high and high school years where their kids drifted apart in an effort to find their own identities. I was one of the nerdy kids (the one who talked Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, and spend tutorial periods talking with my AP English teacher about books I read that *gasp* weren’t even assigned to me by anyone. K was more of the artsy kind of outsider, and so we didn’t cross paths too often as we grew up.

And then she died.

K came down with a sudden and deadly illness (some kind of meningitis, I think), and went from being totally healthy, to really sick, to dead in a matter of days. The entire school was reeling; this was the first time any of us had lost a classmate.

To make matters worse, my journalism teacher (I worked for the school paper) decided that, as one of the paper’s best writers and someone who knew K personally for a long time, I should be the one to write an article about her passing. I had to go to her house less than a week after her passing, and talk to her parents about their loss, what they were going through, what they wanted K’s classmates to know, etc.

As they sat there and told me about the young woman K was growing into, and all the things that she had accomplished in recent years which I didn’t even know about because we didn’t run in the same circles anymore, I became incredibly sad not just for their family’s loss, but for my loss at having not taken the time to get to know her as we got older.

When I go home to visit my parents (who still live in their same house in their same neighborhood), I can’t help but pull that high school newspaper article I wrote out of storage and re-reading it. Then I go for a walk along that street two streets away, and pass by the house where I sat and asked journalist-type questions of a friend’s parents who had just lost their daughter. I don’t know if they even still live there or not, but I then think about K, and who she would have been now, nearly twenty years later, if she were still alive.

I have experienced a lot of sad events in my life: the loss of friends and loved ones, missed opportunities, regrets over things that I’ve said or left unsaid. There’s no shortage of moments that, upon reflection, leave me feeling a little melancholy. But I don’t think anything will compete with sitting across the dining room table from a pair of grieving, sobbing parents... and wondering why I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know their daughter a little better before she unexpectedly died.

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624 words

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