At the age of twelve I began to learn how to juggle. I saw the pieces of my life falling all around me, so in my adolescence, I tried to remain whole by proclaiming my individuality with green hair dye. Having been the quiet girl for so many years, I did not exactly capture wide attention, but instead remained distant, while pretending to be confident. I looked around my seventh-grade classrooms and worried that I was the only person with a secret. Some days it took effort to lift my head from the desk. In the eighth grade, when I began feeling distanced from even my friends, I decided I needed an outlet, so I approached my Spanish teacher. I stood in front of her little computer table in the back of the classroom and, like a magician pulling coins from behind the ear a child, I began to reveal the different tokens that were weighing me down. From my left palm, I showed her the story of my sister who, in her own adolescent cry for independence, was breaking away from the family. From my right hand, I revealed an aunt who I once laughed with in her bedroom as we watched television as she told me stories and now could hardly speak some days because she loved drugs more than living. And from beneath my heart I poured out the story of my grandfather, who lived in my dining room, sleeping in a home-hospital bed where our large wooden table once had been. I told her he was dying; that he moved in with us to die; that my grandmother had just left us the year before; that I was scared. She listened patiently, and when she spoke, she said, "Well, are you all right?" For an entire school year I had been waiting for somebody to notice me, to ask me if I was all right. I told her I'd had better days. I knew she understood and I felt not so alone.
As the year progressed, my grandfather's condition slowly deteriorated. At night I would sit across from him at the table and watch him choke on dinner before he was finally able to swallow. The next day, during lunch, I would walk to my Spanish teacher's classroom and talk to her about juggling life. Or sometimes she would let me just sit on a desk and watch her type on her computer. She gave me a nickname and some days would use it in class, fit it into part of her lesson somehow. She would flash me a glance and I would laugh and feel so special knowing that she and I had that connection that nobody else in the class could share. After school I would walk with her from our middle school to the elementary school down the street where her son attended kindergarten. I don't recall her every asking anything more than "how are you today?" That was all I needed: somebody to walk next to me and wait until I was ready to talk. I told her about my grandfather falling as he tried to walk the twenty feet from the kitchen table to his bed. I was home by myself and I had to untangle his limbs, which he could not manage to lift off of one another, and help him to his feet. She shared with me pieces of her life, the dredges that weighed her down: the death of her husband and her best friend who happened to share my birthday. During those five-minute walks to the elementary school, I felt more like I real person than I had since the first night I heard my grandfather's snores enter the darkness of my once-silent pink bedroom.
Though my Spanish teacher moved away the June after my eighth-grade year, she still sent me postcards and birthday cards. I sent her e-mails. She responded. And the day of my grandfather's funeral, half way through July, she called me to say she was sorry. She apologized for not be there for me when I needed her. I did not know what to say. In one school year she helped me collect the pieces of myself and glue them back together. I still remember every word of Spanish that I learned in her class. And after our first talk in the back of her classroom, I don't remember spending another class period with my head down on the desk.
-- Student name, student's school