Inside me lives a scared sixth grader.Once upon a time in sixth grade a girl named Sabrina had to leave in the middle of the year. This was not uncommon, in first grade our teacher unexpectedly left in the middle of the year and in every year someone left and someone new came. Our classes were small and I knew Sabrina pretty well; she was amazingly nice and soft spoken and seemed more mature than the rest of us. Even though I knew her, we weren't best friends, and we never saw each other outside of school.
But when she announced she was leaving, I unraveled.
Not just normal tears, but a continual aching sob. It was the middle of a school day and I was back in the bathroom at the end of our class sobbing. I couldn't stop. I couldn't breathe. I was hyperventilating, over heating, having a full meltdown. I was crying so much that my teacher, who was sweet and calm and put up with a lot of crazy things from a bunch of multicultural sixth graders, came back and told me I had to shut up and get it together.
The closest I had come to being that sad was when I left America to go back home to Taiwan after a year of fourth grade in the states. A classmate showed up at my house, once again a girl who was nice, but I wasn't that close with, with a little glass dog to give me as a parting gift. I still have the dog. And we cried on the front lawn while our mothers waited. But even that time, it wasn't that bad, I eventually stopped crying.
In sixth grade I couldn't stop. All the grief of years past, filled with the knowledge that it wasn't going end just overwhelmed me.
I had never cried that hard before, and I never have again, but every time someone leaves that scared sixth grader begins to creep up. When I stand in an airport with all that I own in suitcases, that little girl lurches inside. Because inside is all that grief, all that loss, that I thought was normal, that I thought all people constantly dealt with, piled up inside me. And when the loss of a best friend in third grade fades away, the loss of a best friend in seventh grade happens, and when that begins to fade, the loss of my school, my home, my culture, my security happens. And once again, the grief remains inside of a shaking sixth grader hiding in the bathroom.
