Light and Shadow Within the Light
It was in the spring when I had just unpacked my belongings after moving to a new town.
I began attending a new school — surrounded by unfamiliar voices, unfamiliar walls, unfamiliar air.
Still, I found it easy to get along with others.
A smile, a meeting of eyes — that was often enough to shorten the distance between us.
Perhaps that innocent behavior had been my first form of defense.
Yet, things did not always go so smoothly.
A boy one year older than me began to follow me with his eyes, then with his footsteps.
On my way home he would shove my shoulder, hide behind walls, and mock me.
I could not understand why I had been chosen.
It simply felt unjust.
When I told my mother, she said,
"Sometimes people are mean to those they like."
But I could not agree.
I could not see how affection could justify cruelty.
His older brother was different — gentle, patient, protective.
He scolded his sibling for the bullying, and I came to trust him,
as one might trust the brief sunlight that breaks through after a storm.
Yet one day, when he introduced me to his friends,
he smiled and lifted his little finger — a sign whose meaning I only came to understand later.
Not long after, there was a wedding at the church,
and I was chosen to scatter flower petals along the aisle.
The adults called me "adorable," dressed me in white, and placed me before the altar.
The light from the stained glass was dazzling,
and the sound of the bell trembled through the ceiling.
At first, I felt proud — blessed, even.
But soon I began to sense something foreign in their gazes.
I no longer knew whether I was being celebrated or observed.
Each falling petal dimmed something inside me.
The following year, when I was asked again, I simply shook my head.
It was then that a quiet certainty took root within me:
that being called beautiful was never a promise of happiness.
Behind that word, there always hid someone's desire —
and someone's gaze.
The Teacher's Eyes
In my second year, my homeroom teacher was an older man.
For reasons I could not name, he treated me differently —
my answers were never corrected, my mistakes never scolded.
His gaze held something not of an educator, but of an unnamed hunger.
I began to recognize a certain murkiness that did not exist in the eyes of my friends.
Gradually, I learned to step back, to make myself smaller.
Thus I learned — even as a child —
that beauty, no matter how praised, does not always lead to happiness.