When I was in the second year of high school (that is, grade 11), I was having a severe case of young adult crisis. I hear that many people go through an existential crisis around this age. My symptom was that I stopped speaking at school. I was never comfortable with crowds (still remains true to this day), and I experienced extreme discomfort crammed into a room with other 39 girls for 8 hours every day. Since I felt completely lost, I usually passed the day sitting at my desk as still and quiet as a tree.
My days would have been so miserable if they hadn’t been for the one friend I had in my class. She and I discovered each other probably through our awkward movements in the classroom. We started to talk during the lunchbreak and exchange comments about each other’s experience at school.
Our conversations usually took place in a hidden corner of the cluttered earth science classroom. Surrounded by walls of sleeping bags and other equipment, we would eat our lunch and talk. There was another group of girls who found solace in the room watching cartoon movies, and sometimes, one of them would come over to offer their snack to us.
One day in late November, my friend and I were feeling particularly adventurous, and decided to eat our lunch on the school rooftop. The rooftop was not open to students, but since we were members of the earth science club, we asked the teacher for the key to the rooftop telling him that we were going to observe the Sunspot.
Permission granted, we ran up the stairs to the rooftop with lunch and blankets. Looking over the skyline of my hometown with my friend, I felt free like a bird. Cuddled in our blankets, we ate lunch and talked about our lives.
We were so in love with our conversation and the view from the rooftop that we ended up skipping the remaining two classes of the afternoon. As we sat on the rooftop like two queens and wondered what the rest of the class might be doing, something white fell on my friend’s shoulder. “Snow!” She said and looked up. Soon, the wind carried a sequence of faint snowflakes upon us.
That was the first snow of that winter.