Books and Fate

I have finished the second book of the night. I intend to start a third.

The second book in question happens to be The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It was good, but it took warming up to. I don't know if it was too close to me, too overdone, or too much of anything.

Right now I'm not sure if this voracious reading is entertainment or escape.

The thing is, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is more or less a book about fate. About how you are always affecting others and lives are always entwined with one another.

And I think, now:

If my parents had not come to school here, I would not be writing in English. I might not even exist. Was it fate?

If we hadn't moved when I was five, I might have gone to my friend's current school and thus met her and possibly all my other friends. Was it fate?

If I hadn't known so many of the people I do, I would not be this person. I could be someone far different. Were all of my encounters fate?

Fate has played a massive role in my life, I think. Fate and chance. My life sometimes feels as if it's on an edge, or a dartboard. Something random. I don't understand it.

I don't get how some people I meet seem to be like fictional characters. I don't grasp how I can have two languages and almost two lives. I don't see how I - me! - got the chance to be this way.

Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve it.

In Which I am a Five-Year-Old Teenager

Today we had a meitzav, or a statewide test, in math. One of the easier things I've done. I think I got at least a 90, which I like, because normally on math tests I don't get too far over 85 or 90, sometimes less. So that's nice.

And it was my last test here, as a friend of mine took care to inform me afterwards, before I went to buy a bag of chocolate milk (yes, they sell chocolate milk in bag-type things) to rejuvenate my utterly fried brain.

Then, in English class, we were talking about our plans for the summer, specifically so the teacher could correct pronunciation. Obviously she didn't correct mine, but after I finished saying that I was going back to America, seeing my friends, going to some art and writing camp-things, and possibly going to New York, she said that it had been really nice to have me in her class and for everyone to hear an American accent besides hers. She said I'd contributed to the class discussions (which I do think was one of the high points of being here, especially the calling-out part) and that she'd miss me. Then everyone clapped and I just sat there in the back of the class, embarrassed yet elated, tracing the "love" that someone had carved into the desk just for something to do.

Then math class got cancelled, which was brilliant because it chopped an hour and forty-five minutes off my school day and I walked home with some friends, making fun of two of our other buddies who were walking about twenty paces in front of us and couldn't hear a word we were saying. All mockery, and all pretty much that old rhyme, "___ and ___ sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage."

I suppose, deep down, I'm not more than five years old. It's becoming more and more apparent now. Oh well, being five is fun.