Memoir

What role does a coincidence play in our lives? Is it just a thing we fear, but cannot escape, or maybe it is a thing we should look forward to? Once I wondered which the right answer was, or even if there was one. After many coincidences and events that followed I decided to stick to the opinion that actually there is no such thing as a coincidence in our lives. Every single thing we come upon, every single person we meet serve as a sign showing where should we go. One of such huge signs happened to be my aunt.
Today she is a well - received English teacher at a gymnasium, but when I met her for the first time she was one odd aunt I could say. I was 4 or 5 years old then, we were lying in the grass, looking at the sky when she asked what do I see, naturally I explained her that one of the clouds was a castle and the other two made a two – headed dragon, I expected to be laughed at (how else an adult could react), but instead with a curious face she asked why these things were in the sky. “ Where else would people dreams be?” I answered, surprised she didn’t know such basic things. She smiled. And so our strange relationship began. I didn’t see her much until the 6th grade, because of her being banned from my home, for reasons nobody cared to explain me. But as I started going to school in Klaipeda, I started visiting her more and more. Partly because I didn’t have much friends at school, but mostly because she somehow understood me, without me saying anything. Slowly from just my aunt she became my teacher.
Because I still lived with my parents, I couldn’t stay at her place more than once a month. And so as not to feel lonely she gave me a book, it was “ The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. This book and the ones that followed after it represent the first major turning point in my life. I actually began to live with a book; I would read while eating, while going to school, during breaks, during my free time. I was and still am mesmerized by the worlds books offer to us. Moreover, all the questions my young mind presented I had answered by my aunt during our late night talks. We would talk until 3 or 4 in the morning, lights off, lying in our beds and imagining what the life on Mars would be, in great detail. It sounds almost silly now, but it opened my mind to the infinite amount of possibilities. My aunt – my teacher opened the doors through which I was willing to go.
Though at that time I didn’t realize where I was going, what consequences it would bring, I don’t regret it one bit. It was around the time I once again changed schools. By reading, by raising questions about life I became different from my down to earth classmates. I was seen as some kind of a weirdo. So naturally, I began to doubt myself. It was a darkest hours of my life. I would often cry myself to sleep not knowing how to fix myself, how to be normal. It was terrible, but with aunt’s continuous efforts to make me understand that being different is more of a blessing than some kind of curse I began to see myself as I am. She made me analyse myself, study my actions, my responses. She taught me how to know, how to understand myself.
After two years I changed schools again. I was different but it no longer made me feel less worthy, I knew the world was a lot bigger than we can imagine and yet those two last years at school where my aunt was a teacher, somehow were necessary to complete that period of my life. She finished her teachings by encouraging me to look for more than a task or homework required, to seek perfection in whatever I do. With that she as if completed her role as a teacher, and became more, she became my dearest friend, who she is up until now.
I do not want to imagine what my life would be like if I had not had such an aunt, such a teacher and such a wonderful friend. She safeguarded me against the wrong paths, and yet she let me experience the life fully with its pluses and minuses. I only wish that someday I could make that big of a difference in someone’s life.