People can come and go in a blink of an eye in your life. Some people stay while others just drift away. I could not count on my hands and toes how many people have come and go in my life. I have learned that you cannot keep someone in your life forever, even if you try.
I have learned to never take a single person that does come into my life for granted. I have seen a situation where a person has made a friend, said something that they have regret about them and never got the chance to apologize multiple times. I have not only seen it in movies, but I have experienced it firsthand.
Back when I was just eight-years-old, I made a friend. At first, I thought he was a pest, because he would just not leave me alone. He would follow me everywhere I went and would always call my house to see if I was “still alive” as he put it. When I would fall ill, my friend would call me to make sure that I was fine, which I assured him I was every time.
Then later as time passed he started to really grow on me as I started to see the heart and the person in him more and more. I found myself growing closer and closer to him, so much so to where we actually became inseparable at one point.
The closer I grew to him, the more I noticed he was missing school constantly. I was beginning to think that something was wrong with me, so I would call his house to make sure that he was “still alive,” just like he did to me. He would answer and reassure me that everything was completely fine. However I started to rectify his “disappearances” as startling, especially since no one would tell me why he was missing school so much.
When I did see him, he seemed grouchy and irritable towards me. I took it personal and we started to argue over the matter so much that it caused us to grow apart. When I transferred to another elementary school for my last year, we ended up losing contact for good.
As more time passed, I started to realize how much I appreciated his presence so I tried to reach out to him again via mutual friends on social media. But I never got a response.
One day as I was over one my friend’s house, they handed me a yearbook. I started to flip through all of the pages and saw it right there, his memorial page. They had passed away the following year after I left from cancer.
I just felt awful and stupid as I started to reflect on how I treated him. I started to realize I had acted with my emotions instead of really listening to him. He has tried to explain to me why he was out so much. He was not only sick, he was actually dying and he knew it, at the tender age of only eight years. Almost immediately, I wished I could go back in time and redo things. I should have apologized when I had the chance.
This is when I grasped the important life lesson that I should never take a person’s friendliness for granted again. The message I want to share now is to love everyone even if it is hard to love yourself sometimes.