Midterm Essay.

i didn't change a word in this. and those things pn. Salwana marked as wrong, i checked... they're not wrong. i guess it's okay if she tells me that my sentences are chopped off. but 'china' and 'candlelit' are definitely correct words. :P
i got 40/50 for this.

continuous writing for the lines "it was a beautiful morning. i woke up early..."

It was a beautiful morning. I woke up early feeling out of place from the rest of the world.

I stumbled downstairs to find nobody home, with a chair upturned and broken china on the table.

Tears filled my eyes as my head let the pictures of yesterday’s war rage back in. My heart shied away from the pain. And for a second, I couldn’t move. So I sat right there, next to the upturned chair.

My parents fought a lot, especially these days. Vincent was so happy when he moved out for college and solemnly said good luck to me. I told him to get me a soundproof room and I’d be fine.

The noises I heard sent me from my room, downstairs, to see their angry, hurt faces…

After a long while, I decided to take the bus to the local library and went poking through some old books on the shelves just to past time.

One particular book caught my eye. It had yellowed pages, was thick and leather-bound. I finger its spine as I tried to make out the faded black wordings across the dark brown leather.

After a long moment, I realized it was a language I didn’t understand. Funnily, I felt more compelled to remove it from the shelf were it must have been collecting dust for too long. So I did. I carried it carefully to where I had left my belongings.

I sat down and opened the book surprised to find it was in a language I understood – English. I closed the book back to check the title again. I blinked repeatedly.

I now read “Love”.

Now, I couldn’t have gotten that wrong, I thought to myself.

Feeling excited, I reopened the book. On its first page was a small paragraph, printed in black.

“Once upon a time, when the gods and people lived together, people had four arms and four legs. They had two heads and two faces. They existed happily as they were, growing more powerful as time went on. The gods decided that the people were getting too powerful and needed to be put back in place somehow, and so cut them into half. Each human now only had one head and one face. They spent the rest of their lives searching for their other half to make themselves whole again. So, it became the point of life.”

I read the story through to make sure it imprinted perfectly into my memory before flipping the page.

“I picked my sister up from school one day and she asked me to drop her at the library. I asked why and she answered that she needed a book on sign language.

“Apparently, there was a new boy in class who was deaf.

“Today, I watched my sister make the signs for “I do” to the very same boy.”

And that was what the book was filled with. Entry by entry, page by page. All the little stories of love and the sweetest gestures. The best part, the amazing part was that with each story came a date. And I had to believe that these stories happened to somebody.

“I saw a homeless man by the parking lot today after I came out of the hypermarket. He asked me for some change.

“I gave him two dimes because that was all I had with me.

“As I was leaving, I saw him putting the dimes into a parking meter for a stranger.”

I kept reading.

A creak made me look up. Someone sat down in the chair across of me. Her hair was gray to its end. But I didn’t feel that she was old because of the warm smile and twinkly eyes she had on me.

“Don’t you wonder why you can read that?” she asked me with a cheerful little chuckle.

I nodded. She leaned forward and locked my eyes on her magical ones.

“You see, dear, there’s a type of language anyone on Earth, even if you can’t read, don’t speak, can’t hear, can understand.” She paused, leaning back against the chair again. “Hope. Hope and love. Compassion, kindness and all the good things in life – the only things that matter!”

And she was right.

By the time, I looked down at the book, deep in thought, and looked back up, the old lady was gone. But her wisdom stayed with me, to this very day.

That night, my parents came home to a candlelit dinner. I placed a note in the middle of the table that said, “Every little thing is a miracle. And hope is just a feeling we forget on the blue days. I love you.”

So till this day, they are still happily married and are celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary tomorrow.

And I never saw that book again but I see love everyday, everywhere.