From a Chance of Encounter to a Long Lasting Friendship

By Shuwen Chen

I believed that life is a stage of drama; expectedly, those movie scenes were recalling my thoughts and feelings about friendships that I built with people in my pure childhood that I am willing to keep and recall, or the realistic adulthood that I must learn from.

Ru and I were met in the only school that near us. Our village was separated into wealthier villagers lived on the hill and the common people who lived down hill. , but we were united as a village. In that austere, but class differentiated village, has kept all our precious childhood memories.

We were in the same grade, studied in the same school and lived in the same village. However, we did not meet until a random class arrangement that made she became my deskmate when we were nine. We both enjoyed the rumor of our nickname, the black and white queens, and spreading out in school. Despite our personalities or family backgrounds, we have destined to be friends, we are like peas and carrots and that all began on the second to the last tables in the second column in a new classroom for the fourth grade.  

The school was located in the middle of some farmlands, and it was reconstructed in the summer without any outdoor facilities; it was simply a piece of flat square meter concrete on top of the earth. All students from first grade to fifth were studied in a four-floored academic building, where a new dome for teachers was in between the new building and the pre-school that was relocated in the old school parts. Our classroom had a row of bright and tall windows on the left wall. In class, Ru would turned her head to me and gazed at the scenic view outside of those windows, where a laddered mountain front side has grown some glossing green commercial longan and lychee fruit trees. At the mountain foot, a quiet lake that reflected the image of the lakeside vegetation has disturbed by flying barn swallows into waterline.

During the school days, we spent most of our time on pen drama on the tables, even if there was a lecture. Before the show time, we combined two tables be the stage, each table was a house. Alternatively, we used our textbooks to make curtains, dinner tables and bedrooms. The slim or light colored pens were always the actresses, while others were actors. For each show, we set up a meeting scene, either at a coffee shop or in a library, where the leading actress unintentionally dropped a book on the floor and the leading actor picked it up. At the moment when the actor passed that book, then they fell in love at the first sight. Our performing vessels were solid and not real; so, we had to use our imagination with vocal expression and movements to present the emotions. Ru and I were the directors, producers, filmmakers and voice speakers.

“What happened there”, our Chinese teacher asked on the teaching platform. I quickly felt that my classmates were laughing at me. I looked at Ru confusedly with my eyes winking, “what happened”, I whispered. Ru looked forward and calm as she was slightly writing on her notebook: People heard your scripts. You were too excited. My face turned red instantly, but I could not resist chuckling few. After couple weeks of performing, our “shows” finally gathered some royal audiences around our tables when there was a class break, which also consisted of some students from other classes.

Good times went by and we were still randomly arranged in a same class, but different tables when we were in fifth grade. In a causal hot summer day, we walked with the hidden cicadas in the shades chirping rhymes on the flaky tree barks and the village was embraced under a visually arching and miles-wide blue sky. We were inseparable like forms and shadows under the burning and hung-highly sun.

Our shadows were finally connected with the vigorous mulberry and guava tree shades that bloom in the summer with a sugarcane plantation around my house. I was stronger than Ru, that led me to be a good tree climber so that I could climb every single tree and pick the ripen guava. I would throw them to Ru, while she was picking the dark purple mulberries on the lower branches and placing them into a plastic basket. Within ten minutes, our tacit teamwork conquered the humid summer. After that, we sat on the washed to smooth gravels and placed our feet in the limpid stream that flowed across the entire village. Our basket of fruits was tied with a long stripe on a banian tree and being washed in the slow and cold flowing water. In the insufferable hot summer days of our childhood, under a shady and cool banian tree, which held up a future that we dreamed being grown up,

When we had to bike a two-hours round trip to our junior high school, my mom always reminded me, “ride safely”, as I was leaving on my bike to meet up with Ru. We struggled on the hills and slid down hills. We biked across on an antiquated bridge with some broken down concreted handrails that have revealed the sealed iron rods in the core. Passing through the mangrove and phragmitie brushes, we finally exsited onto the road.  There were no traffic lights, stop signs and bike lanes; there were only some occasional fast bee-buzzing cars speeding by, which horrified me. Comfortably, Ru always stayed on the outer side when we biked in a row even despite the rainy or hot days.

Last night, my unrested imaginations about all exciting things in Chinese New Year holidays, which will start after tomorrow school, occupied my entire sleeping time. And that excitement was continued on our bike trip. The emotions inside of me provoked my speed and riding as a snake crawling ahead of the abnormally quiet Ru today.  

When I was filled with holiday excitements, a motorcycle rushed out from the right, and snaggeed my bike handle along. It was too late and too fast for me to pull on the brakes. I was like a thunder shooting in the air across the sidewalk after hitting the road curb. Ru did not even put her favorite bike on brake, she jumped high and she immediately reached her out arm with open hand, but she could not grab me. I thought: doesn’t this only happen in scenes of car crushing movie? I was thrown up higher in the air. I saw the something that never happened in Ru’s eyes; her tears were rolling and dropping like the unwanted raindrops.

It was an extremely cold winter that year. Ru has not attended to any classes for few days and I missed to see someone sitting on my right. After the last math class, I ran like a blow wind straight to her house and screamed, “Black, I am here!” She heavily walked out her stoned gate door in the front yard and smiled at me. “You missed lots of classes”, I said madly. She averted her gaze.

I padded twice on the marble rock that I was sitting on, and then I pulled her down to sit next to me. “My family is divided”, she said. “It is because my grandmother has not been getting along with my great-grandmother. So, they decided to live in the same house, but everything else will be independent”, she continued. I placed my right arm around her, and I gently pulled her head closer on my shoulder, “You always have me here”, I whispered.

Although, I felt she was sad, she let my shoulder stay dry with no tears on and I kept listening as she continued talking.

Ru’s arm slipped further and further away from me. I panicked and rushed to hold on to a mango tree branch, then like an uncontrollable horse without a leash and I fell into the mangroves bush. We were not surprised; I landed in water, because that scene also happens in movies. Ru rushed to me after she embarrassedly slid down on the hill, “I should have rode next to you as usual”, Ru choked with sobs.

By a gaze at her red eyes, I understood the reason that she was always biking on the outside lane, protecting me like a handrail on our bridge of friendship. A bridge that is invincible despite distance or time between us. It is always like in another beautiful summer morning in the village, when the newborn sun shines on the green tender banian leaves that keep our friendship youthful and warm.

Today, as I am growing up in a distant country, the United States, and interact with the reality, this led me to realize that the purity of friendship has rude by materialism. Unlike the movies that the happy endings can be written then edited for the public favor. However, good times in the past are never gone, which reminds me some lyrics of a song that our English teacher from the fourth grade played once for the class, Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters in 1973,

…All my best memories
Come back clearly to me
Some can even make me cry
Just like before…

It's yesterday once more.