CHASING FOR LOST TREASURE

UNEDITED SAMPLE LITERARY ARTICLE
By Ancilla Marie Baulita Inocencio
IV – Madame Marie Curie


I was always very excited to go home after class. I still remember how joyful my childhood was. It was as colorful as rainbows yet not as special as those rich children who indulge in their pleasures. I could even be portrayed as a street child, as in someone who was always on the street. Not thinking of what it could result to, I did everything carelessly. My childhood friends meant everything to me; they were all I wanted and needed in everything I did.

We played on the street every afternoon, sometimes, even extending until midnight. I can still see me and my friends playing traditional street games, celebrating each holiday with our own parties, spending vacations playing under the sun, and mourning over our pets in their own funerals. I really missed how we would scare ourselves as we played in the tree house we made ourselves or in the small hut that was only half done, how we pretended to be riding on planes when we were only sitting on chairs, how we choreographed dances for programs in our parties, how we made crayons into candles, how we slept under the stars inside our tent while it was raining very hard outside. We even made swings out of dog chains and pieces of wood, ice candies of great varieties, and ice creams of only one flavor, magazines only handwritten and one-act plays out of our rich and playful imagination.

There are a lot of stories I can tell only from my childhood, but as I grow older, those stories began to make less sense. My way of looking at things changed from imaginative and unbelievable to realistic and dull. We moved to a new house and these friends began to diminish one by one as if swallowed by monsters. As time passed by, almost all of them started to lose their place in my memory. They began to lose their value; from those valuable gems, they changed into insignificant trash.

They say that time heals everything, but it is not what only time can do. It had made me forget what was once important to me. Now, I feel so alone, so isolated, even if I am surrounded with what I call my peers. I long for what I lost; I hope to find pieces of that treasure to complete the emptiness that fills my heart and I wish to rebuild the past that remains blurred in my eyes.

I was once excited to grow up, but now, I realize that even if that period of growth had made me more mature, I would still be willing to give up all I have to turn back the old times. It is only now that I had lost them that I learned their true value. Growing up was fun, I enjoyed it a lot and I am thrilled with my new friends, but as I left grade school, my friends there forgot about me as I forgot about them. Now I am in high school, I am afraid that the same thing will happen. They say that relationships may come and go but friends are forever. I don’t really know what to believe and no one could possibly know how scared I really am to walk my life on my own not because of how challenging life could be but how I could forgive myself if I let that friendship wither. That was my only treasure and I had let pirates take it away from me, now, I have nothing. I could only wait to end this year expecting my newly found friendship to be torn down in the end.

Emptiness fills my soul so I want to replenish my thirst for friendship, to clear my conscience of the friendship I myself had once destroyed, to make my childhood dreams reality once more. It would seem foolish to reminisce about those moments that my childhood friends could have long forgotten. I might not even be able to restore the friendship I once had. I could not blame them if they would no longer be interested in it. I could not return the lost time I had had that would have enabled me to change the past. The past is past and all I could do now is to keep moving forward. I am not capable of knowing or predicting what may happen in the future but I am certain that I could and would make new friends and still keep the old ones. I may not be able to reiterate those moments I had with my childhood friends, but that’s what makes every moment of one’s life unique. I had learned my lesson from what I had done and now I only look forward to the future that awaits me. It is unpredictable, and that’s what makes life more exciting.