September 9, 2016 - 22:52
Every coin has two sides. Angle couldn’t exist without evil and life cannot flourish without sacrifice. ‘There is no vapid, irresponsible happiness.’ As Le Guin suggests, things could be deceptively flawless when you only view them from the surfaces. Just like how the prosperous of some cities stems its roots into the darkness of slavery, how the life of upper-classes thrives on the corruptions and how the citizen of Omelas intoxicated in joy blind to the child in the basement in Le Guin’s story, I was deceived by the friendship that happened to me which I once perceived as life-long.
I’ve always wondered if there’s somebody on earth that share the same thoughts and interest and characteristic of mine. Jing was happened to rush into my life on the first day of our Junior school. She was as the same height. She had long straight hair as I was and also a short gleamy hair fringe on the forehead. Her dress looked exactly the same as mine. I stood in front of her, pondering what to say next. I was startled by someone who looks so similar as me and I was, at that time, thinking we doomed to be best friends.
I was invited to her home after two weeks and she showed me all of her dresses, which are the exact size of mine. She put her clothes on me with great excitement and passion like dressing up a doll, while I love standing next to her in front of a mirror—how similar we look like! We both love watching horror movies which we watch together at every weekend night and cover each other’s eyes with our palms. I found posters of my favorite bands in her bedroom, which we can talk about all day long. But what excite us most was making jokes of every classmate on our class with no offends and laughed out loud till we both got stomachache, my brother was always thought my laughing point was queer, but she’s the one who could get them all.
We spent nights and days lying on her bed chatting randomly, cuddling each other, from the most trifle things to our wildest dreams. The connection became even stronger by our similar backgrounds. Jing has a family which her dad makes most of the decisions and takes most controls. She complained about how her dad hurts her feeling when he threw away her violin and locked her in her room, restricting her from doing anything but study, reminded me of my own, that how I was trying to hide and escape to read novels when I was supposed to do the homework and how I reprehended by my dad when I returned home late. I couldn’t remember how the mood then became so melancholy and how we spoke out secrets out to the stars. Then I reached out my hands to grab hers.
That’s how our relationship grew close. Every adorable words that could be used to describe a best buddy could be used to describe us. Unlike other close friends, we never cheated on others, never fight, even never had any disagreements. Whenever I want to laugh, she begins laughing too. ‘A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.’ Written by Le Guin, those ‘‘contentment’ and ‘triumph’ also swelled my heart.I was dizzied in our friendship, a flower under the brightest sunlight and protected by shades of the palm trees, blossoms flawlessly.
But when you find something that’s too good to be true, strikes you as ‘goody-goody’, something must go wrong underneath. Once when we accidentally came into the topic of ‘future husband’, like most best buddies would do, our opinions differed. I told her that I want to find some one who would respect and support me but girls need to rely on their own, while she thought her ideal life was to find a rich man that she wouldn’t have to work again, all she had to do were hangout with friends, watch soap opera all day long and have bunch of dresses which are more than enough. I can’t suppress my query ‘:’What if your husband treats your badly or takes most controls of your life?’ ‘That’s not something I could decide,’ She answered calmly as it is,’ Man were born to be like this. That’s what husbands do.’ I was stunned. After finding out she’s serious, I felt despise at the first time.
Jing seemed so resolute that I gave up persuading her at last. It’s an awful moment when facing something you are not willing to admit. But it is there. ‘They all know it is there, all the people of omelas.’ And now I know, the difference, the unbearable disagreement. The flower that once blossomed was rotten in its roots. It’s hard to make choices. I could be blind to the argument and keep our ‘flawless relationship’ which I always longing for, or I could face my anger and turned away, throwing all those memories behind. It is the existent of the disagreement, and my knowledge of its existence that push me to make the decision. Unlike the citizen of Omelas who willing to ‘exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas’ for ‘the chance of the happiniess of one’, I went the opposite way.
Like the ones who walked away from the Omelas, I walked away from the friendship, and never turned back.