Sometimes in life, we get stronger in influenced by events that happen to other people, generally people closer to us. I was best friends with a girl, we could finish each other’s sentences, and we always knew what the other was thinking. We shared everything, all the events of our daily lives, significant or not. Still, I felt there a certain impenetrable wall, behind which she often hid, with a blank smile on her face to avoid having to answer any questions.
There was a subtle air of mystery in her aura, and it often gave me the feeling that as well as I knew her, there was more to her than she ever let on. She was a unique person in many ways, a paradox of characteristics that is very difficult to find in any one person. She was strongly emotional and fearlessly opinionated. I often felt her fearless attitude was the foil for her insecurities and the untapped emotion inside her which she didn’t reveal to anyone.
She had a strong support system, a loving family, and a group of friends who truly cared, as friends should. She was always surrounded by family and friends, and I often felt like she was striving to be more expressive, to share her emotions so that she could become a better individual, and learn from her experiences. But something inside of her didn’t let her, she would try, fail, and then retreat back in her cozy cocoon, where she kept everyone at arm’s length, even her best friends.
It didn’t stop her from wanting to be different though. She yearned desperately to become a more open person, to live her life out loud, to express her dreams and aspirations, her fears and insecurities, her inner self. She wanted to tell everyone around her that she was a person who loved, who needed to be loved, who believed and had dreams which she wished would someday come true. That she was different than the façade she had built around herself. It was only after a drastic event that fate threw her way, which changed her forever, and allowed this transformation to take place.
It was the winter of 2005 when we were sitting together one day trying to make sense of a major assignment that was due the next day when her father called her and gave her the news which rocked her world as she knew it. The rock in her life, the one around whom her whole life had been built so far, was no longer going to be home when she went home that day. Her mother had been struggling with breast cancer for fifteen years and had been in and out of the hospital throughout her childhood.
And yet she was the strongest woman she knew, who, despite her illness, had raised her children just like any other mother, if not better. She had recently come back from the hospital but had suffered a severe relapse which her weak body could not recover from. The news shook her very core, and though the first feeling she felt was a blank numbness, her façade crumbled as tears she never knew she had flowed down her face as if they would never stop.
Winter winds whipped across her face, and the falling teardrops somehow allowed her to see, smell and hear the things around her in a way she never had before. Suddenly she was completely aware of this new, changed world she would have to live in for the rest of her life, and the shocking realization of utter loneliness felt like a slap on her face. Her cozy cocoon was no longer so, and she knew she needed to deal with this pain, to live this pain, to experience it, and then move on. And that she did.
My friend was a completely different person after that. It was as if the shock had jolted her alive, forced her to realize that life is short, one must embrace it head-on and live each day like it was the last. And for all these things, she will always be the person who influenced me to a great extent, and from whom I learned the most.