“Bing!” The bell rang to tell me my best friend, Anne, had just come online.
Clicking on the instant message window I said, “Hi!”
A message came back from her saying, “Get lost loser.”
I tried it again and asked, “What’s wrong?”
The screen popped up again, “Get lost loser.”
Astonished and freezing up, my hands wandered lost over the keyboard, wordless. A moment ago my spirits were high, and I was looking forward to talking to her. We had never insulted or criticized each other negatively. I just stared blankly at the green and blue words “Get lost loser” the screen blurring as I remembered a day in first grade.
I was looking down in dismay at the blue sky and green grass I had just colored on perfect white paper. The picture was just a bunch of scribbles and I decided to tear it up. As the corner begin to tear, the girl next to me, Anne, leaned over and asked me to stop. We had hung out a bit at recess and were starting to become friends.
She asked if, instead of destroying the picture, we could keep each other’s drawings, and promise to be best friends. We signed our names on our drawings and handed them each other. “We will not be mean, we will be nice, we will tell each other all stuff, and we will be best friends to the end,” we said to one another. I had gazed with a surge of happiness at the picture thinking I would get to know this person almost as well as I knew myself and we would be like sisters.
“Bing!”
The instant messenger rang again and snapped me out of my trance. Anne had typed, “Fine. You really want to know what’s wrong? My boyfriend broke up with me last week after we fooled around and my grandma is in the hospital.”
Smack in the face, she hit me with this information. All of this happened last week? She had not even mentioned it. My best friend had just kept something from me and done something totally against her nature. How could she insult me, fool around like that, how could she have a boyfriend and not tell me? Besides that, and her grandma was sick! My eyes popped out in distress. She had turned her back on me, lied, had not trusted me. The simple, essential knowledge I had a friend to confide in vanished. I knew very little about any of my friends.Stunned, I wrote back that I felt so sorry for her.
“Shut up! You always aggravate me. If I see your screen name write back to me, I’ll block you!”
Sitting there, the words beckoned to me to answer. The computer screen became a blurry splotch in front of me, the air became, tense, bitter, and suffocating. My stomach sank to the floor and a hollow dread consumed me.
Reflection
It was interesting to work on this paper, especially since it would be about something that happened to the writer. The hardest thing to do was come up with an event that had basically turned the world upside down for me personally. The idea I came up with became the topic of my paper, my best friend going against me. Outlining the events was not too hard, except for knowing when to stick the flashback in there. It had to be in the right place so it wouldn’t interfere with the action, and would give enough insight into the friendship between us. It bothered me as I began writing this paper, it wasn’t too fun to re-live one of the worst moments of your life, but it was more significant than other things. I felt positive that this would have to be my idea.
While writing the proposal, it was made clear that I’d have to come up with more details for my paper to be long enough, or capture any interest. Elaborating on feelings and the things occurring really helped that, and made it good. Right before the flashback, I go, “We never insulted or criticized each other negatively. I just stared blankly at the green and blue words “Get lost loser” the screen blurring…” This gives the reader a look at the main character’s view and thoughts, and gets them involved with it. The thing I spent the most time on in the paper was proofreading. It went through my English teacher, Com Skills teacher, and was fixed by me on the computer as I went over it. Most of the errors were word or sentence problems. Since they got fixed, I was able to have a nice final product with no major difficulties.
In writing this piece, I really pushed myself with the emotion, since it was supposed to be a major experience. Near the end is when it really took off, because everything had basically happened. “My stomach sank to the floor and a hollow dread consumed me.” At this point it was harder to word what I’d been feeling. Perhaps this section had too much in it, because the previous paragraph needed more emotion. It was overrun with my thoughts and mental reaction to the experience. “My best friend had just kept something from me and done something totally against her nature. How could she insult me, fool around like that, how could she have a boyfriend and not tell me?”
It would’ve showed a much stronger reaction to have my emotional reaction tied in there.
If I had to do things differently, I’d go through it and insert more emotion. Even in like the flashback, I could’ve showed how I was feeling then so it would contrast with my mood later on. At the end I would’ve probably integrated more reaction, so there could be a sharper view of what the experience was like. I don’t think I did it in the first place, because it was hard to re-live all of this, and put into words what I was like then. It’s kind of hard to describe how you are when your illusion of reality starts to shatter.
