PLEASE BE CRITICAL, ill promise to help you back!
In my six-year-old mind, I see my father in the armour he had on when he combated the boogie monster under my bed. What mattered to me then was my father; because he represented the chivalric honour code of a lost medieval age by which I measured myself. Though as I grew up, my father would often get drunk and have fits of anger and along with that came the realisation that he was also human. With the loss of this ideal, I was forced to confront a far more adult world whose hypocrisies were revealed by divorce and abandonment, and through the use of witty ripostes, I distanced myself from a world that without my fatherly ideals left me thoroughly disillusioned. My problem though, far from being too misanthropic, was that I could never reconcile myself to the loss of my ideals, instead I would spend the next few years of my life trying to recover the ideal I had lost by being obedient.
When I met Aaron in the seventh grade, it was like finding the missing part of my heart. We didn't belong in our private school and had parents whom we could never connect to and that's why we never left each other's side. However, as the years went by, he changed. Fuelled by his deteriorating relationship with his parents, he began to depend upon cigarettes and alcohol. It wasn't long before he started drugs and with that came the urge to get involved in fights. We became two different people under the same pressure, yet I still loved and admired him. He had the confidence and the resolve I wanted. We were never happy at home, yet he always knew how to look ahead. Unlike him, I could never really think for myself, and I certainly wasn't fit to decide to live by myself.
Senior year brought his sudden expulsion, leaving me empty and incomplete. It was only after his loss that I was able to put our relationship in perspective. Aaron helped me to grow up. He taught me that there are specific ideals we must lose - in my case, the ideal of heroism my parents represented - and the individual identity we should never give up in the pursuit of what is lost. I was and still am somewhat of an introvert, but he helped me leave my shell and experience the ocean outside. I did things with him that I would never have done on my own - standing up to bullies, sleeping in backyards, riding on motorcycles, crazy things. He taught the importance of washing my own clothes, paying my own rent and above all, never letting my circumstances dictate my outcome. Thanks to Aaron, I learnt to be independent; for in the pursuit of what was lost, I had given up something that we ought never to lose, the individual identity that made me human.
I still miss him, and occasionally wish to be young. But we all grow up, and the experiences have shaped who I am today. Indeed, growing up engaged me with the loss of things, but to my understanding it was the things that have been lost and not the act of losing them that truly engages me - the pursuit of childhood ideals which each of us must ultimately lose, and the gain of a far more valuable individual identity of which we should never let go.
