You wake up by a warm morning sunshine
shining your bedroom curtain. You get ready to go to Kindergarten as usual,
preparing some lollipops and snacks for your friends. As the fickle weather of
early spring chills the ground, you get out your thick jacket from the top of
the wardrobe, barely by stepping on the tall chair. You call your daddy who
drives you to the Kindergarten everyday.
The kindergarten is in the 2nd floor of a
gray colored building.
2nd floor.
NO it isn’t.
It feels as if there were 10 floors between
the lobby of the building and the entrance of your cozy kindergarten. The
overwhelming number of stairs that connected the first floor with the second
one is like a pit of frightful hell you must pass in order to reach a heaven.
After dozing off for couple ten minutes,
you arrive at the building. You are quite scared, thinking how awful it is to
climb up each stair that made you so nervous.
“Daddy…” you said in a shrinking voice
“Again? What makes you feel so uneasy that
you cannot go up by yourself?” Dad replied
“uhmm…just…it’s so scary….” You answered
Holding your dad’s hand firmly, you take a
deep breath, and start going up the stairs one by one. The scariest thing was
that the stairs were right aside by a huge glass window; as you glance at the
outside view, your heart beats faster and your hand becomes more filled with
sweat.
‘I might just fall! I can’t take my step’
you shuddered with fear
After passing such obstacle you see your
friends playing and chatting happily in the snug little room. You can then
finally say goodbye to your daddy who might-or has to-come to the second floor
again to escort you down.
Back then, you were a small 7-year-old boy
who feared climbing up stairs by yourself, especially those in your
kindergarten building. Every moment of going up made you feel insecure, as
every electron gets unstable when it goes to the upper electron shell. Maybe
you were just a boy who had a light acrophobia, considering how you got
especially terrified when you looked the outside view through the window glass
during your ‘climbing’. Anyway, when you were young kindergarten kid you always
needed someone-your daddy, brother or even a stranger-to safely usher you to
the heavenly playground. It was also the same when returning back to home, now
having to descend the stairs.
Going down the stairs was even more fearful
than going up. The interval of each stair seemed so huge to merely a
1-meter-tall boy. Sometimes you succeeded in climbing up by yourself, but never
did so when descending. Your legs literally quivered out of such apprehension
about tumbling down or twisting your ankles. When the needle of the clock
hanged on the pastel colored wall of a cozy kindergarten room headed number
‘3’, you suddenly became anxious, imagining how terrible your return-to-home
would be today.
How poignant this trauma is? Well…you, now
grown up as a 17-year-old teenager, can even remember exactly how the outside
view through that window glass looked like. Though it might look quite silly to
others, memories of going up and down the stairs are definitely unforgettable
in your life. In fact, whenever you go through stairs with banisters, you do
remember this threatening childhood experience. Don’t you?
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Park Sang Eon’s comment: It was a good
essay and I especially liked your expressions. For instance, you described how
insecure and unstable you were by making an analogy to an excited electron.
Also, the grammar was almost perfect.
