WHAT IF
Personal Essay
Aekyung Sin
I soon began to acknowledge Ellie as my other half, my better other half. I truly
believed, and wanted to believe in the saying, “A friend is your reflection in the mirror.”
Then came the day when this other half of me began to slowly and painfully tear
itself away. It started when I opened up my butterfly wings by ranking first in class on
the midterm examination. How ironic it was that during this exact period, Ellie’s wings
were violently cut off and she was forced to crawl inside her cocoon.
My heartbeat was the sound of a bass drum in crescendo as I slowly pulled
open the light green curtains surrounding the hospital bed. After drawing in a quick
breath of air, I paused, and finally forced myself to look at my best friend.
Her thin bangs were pulled up to the side with a fading yellow hairpin that I
had given her for her 14th birthday and her short curly eyelashes fluttered softly to
the slow beeping of the heart monitor. Her chapped lips were firmly drawn across her
face in her trademark upside down ‘U,’ reminding me that yes, this was Ellie that I was
looking at. Carefully, I laid my hand on her right wrist, the place where she had drawn
an ungainly gash that nearly took her life.
I wanted to say something, anything, but the noises that came out from my
sputtering lips were equal to that of a toddler’s babble. Before covering my mouth
with the back of my hand and exiting the room, I managed to let out a shaky “I’m
sorry.”
This was what should have happened when Ellie’s mother called to inform me
of my best friend’s suicide attempt. However, it did not. It’s funny how this scene
has sprung solely from my wishful imagination and yet continues to be played out
countless times in my head.
When I first befriended Ellie, she was my role model, my object of emulation,
and my wiser counterpart. She was a perfect model student with impeccable grades
at the time, contrary to me who was an ordinary kid with shabby scores. I set my
goal in life to become her, or at least someone very similar to her. To achieve this, I
followed Ellie around everywhere she went, borrowed her notebooks and textbooks
far too many times, and even used the same pens she used. Surprisingly, Ellie always
welcomed my annoying presence with a motherly smile, as if I were a greedy child that
was to be tolerated with patience.
Over the three years we spent together in middle school, our former mentor-mentee
relationship gradually developed into one in which we were equal counterparts. We
did not fight once – I had succeeded in becoming too much like her over time to leave
any room for disagreement in our conversations.
When I cherished in happiness over my first academic success, Ellie’s father left
her family for a younger woman at v