2.

    There is a girl I like at school. To me, the particular feature that I adore the most about her is her smile, along with the little twinkle that appears in her emerald eyes whenever she does so to me. Another is that aura of mystery that makes a woman. All women have it, but she is by far one of the most enigmatic I have laid my eyes on. It’s sort of like, there’s always more to her than she lets show, like there’s so many more little gems that she hides, so many more things that I can learn about her. It’s this aura of mystery that projects a sort of feminine chastity, which elicits both respect and at the same time, allured curiosity. She is one of the reasons as to why I write right now, in this manner. I even named one of my bonsai plants after her.

    We see each other every after school. That’s when I’m momentarily free from all my schoolwork, and also when she makes her way back home. She always passes by the window of the bonsai clubroom, where I always wait for her. I briefly stop tending my bonsai trees to greet her hi. She says hello back, with the wave of the hand and the smile of my adulations. She stops to talk with me about my commen interests with her, which happen to be writing literature, poetry, storytelling, and horror fiction. Sometimes in our conversations, the topic of whether manga is literature of not slips in (the affirmative side of which I am an ardent defender of). Fortunately, we always end up setting aside our differences and agree to disagree for the day. After a few minutes of talk, we’d bid each other goodbye, and I get to see her smile again. I, however, am always reluctant to part with her. I lean over the window, follow her figure for as long as I can see her, and admire her all her aspects for one last time: like the confident (but not arrogant) bounce in her stride, and the way her light brown hair sways slightly with every step she makes. Every day passes like that, dreamily.

However, something wrong has been happening to her. She’s been gaining popularity these days, way too much popularity. She was initially the subkect of a small but healthy community of friends, but word about her has been spreading, spreading, spreading throughout the campus like the Plague. That fateful day, all I could hear was her name coming out of the mouths of my male classmates. It was just her this, her that, her everything, so much so that it put me in a nasty disposition for the rest of the day. It irked me how overzealously, how wantonly those impressionable, horny boys would just fawn about her and no one else all afternoon.

    The epidemic did not reach its peak for me until late afternoon. When she passed by the bonsai club, I said hi, and she greeted me hello in usual fashion. The thought of getting away from all of that mental agony and finally getting to talk to her -- just her and me -- revitalized me. Before I could get a chance to start the day’s conversation with her though, a boy walked up to her. He was a bespectacled thing, a person awkward and shy in his motions, the face of whom dotted all over with acne and acne scars.

    What most deeply revulsed me about this boy though was that he simply looked like the lowest of the lowest filth of society. His stupid, immature smile, he looked like he was afflicted with a thousand violent epileptic seizures every night, seizures that little by little disfigure and paralyze his facial features, an effect second only in severity to the erasure from his brain all traces of higher cognitive functions and basic human decency.

    In his bony hands was a pink letter, which he tried to give her. I dare not reminisce the damned words that he uttered. All I can say is the only thing she could do in reply to him was to force a polite smile while fidgeting with the ribbons that bound her hair.

    Just listening sickened me to the gut; I felt the urge to slash my wrists just to distract myself to the physical pain of being around this boy.

    I busied myself instead by attending to the bonsai I named after her. She had grown larger over the weekend – much larger than anyone growing bonsai could have ever imagined – but I would have been ecstatic about her growth if not for the dark blight that formed on her leaves! The blight, I swear to the devil, was the ugliest thing to have ever been seen by the eyes of man: from every pore of the branches it cursed oozed a viscous, pus-like substance that crept maliciously deeper and deeper into the main trunk, and the few leaves that were left standing had turned into an abysmal shade of purple, and had wilted inward into perverse, twisted forms.

    The moment their conversation ended, she hurriedly bade me goodbye. I said goodbye after her, but I wasn’t looking at her anymore. I watched as the boy ran back to his group of friends. They were a group of rejects, the collective of malignant tumors that were ailing society. To my horror, they began adoring her out loud. They waved around like raving lunatics all the merchandise they had with her face printed on it, and produced a screaming cacophony that barely resembled the way she sung her songs. One morbidly obese, stubby-fingered kid, the ugliest of them all for sure, produced an artwork he made of her. From the unskilled strokes of the pen, to the amateur shades applied with cheap coloring pencils, it was an absolute disfiguration of her flawless beauty!

    These children! They are only superficial in their so-called “love” for her. Mindless, impressionable, unfaithful things. Once she fades into relative obscurity and the next trending girl catches their fancy, they’ll immediately abandon her completely and begin their worship of other idols. But not me. I won’t forget her, ever. Those rabid mongrels may be able to shout on and on about her to the world for more than I can bear, but I will always dedicate for her a special place in my home, because she left a mark in my heart that will never quite fade away, the impact of which goes beyond a mere change of preferences.

    I looked back to her. The blight was a glaring wrong in her perfection, a filth stain standing on an otherwise masterful dress, stark naked for all to see. As per the propensity of all human beings, this stain will all that will be seen by any and all interested passersby. One glance and word-of-mouth is all it would take before this demon-spawn of a disease would become all that she is to the public eye. All the beauty she possesses would be overshadowed, and all that she is worth would be reduced to nothing. She will become just a memory that everyone would rather forget.

    I must cut away all traces of this disease, for any disease left alone, no matter how small it seems on the surface, can slowly spread, corrupt and destroy its host from the inside. And not only that, I must cut her short. For all her life, prune away all the unnecessary leaves and twigs that stick out, until she is nothing but a small, prim and proper plant. I know that if I let her, she can grow to be the biggest, most magnificent fruit-bearing tree in the entire world. However, I am not willing to. I know it is selfish, but I want to protect her from all the pests and diseases raring to harm her. I must protect that smile.

    The bonsai club usually uses small, scissor-like shears for purposes like these. Those would not suffice. I walk out of the club room and towards the back of the school building, where the old tool shed lies. I descend into the basement within it, and remove the floorboards, one by one. Lying on the dirty soil was the gargantuan pair of gardening shears that I kept in secret. I took them from the clutches of the rotting corpses that were once the suitors of the many girls I liked before her, whom I told to be patient, because there will be new visitors tonight.