When I was seventeen my father went bankrupt, and I was expelled from high school. It was at the end of the semester, and after that, I would not attend school anymore. I had nothing important to do, so I felt like visiting my English teacher.

When I was first informed of my father’s bankrupcy, I didin’t believe it. I thought it was a test he gave me. But the debt collectors don’t lie. My father wanted me to keep studying and enter a university. That was unrealistic, though. I tried to focus on the lecture a million times. It just didn’t work. The essays, slides and fomulas were blocked by a lump of darkness popping up in front of my sight. My mind was stuck by the thought of bankruptcy like a machine with broken gears. My grades dropped from the top to the bottom, unsurprisingly. Paying debts was all I thought about. I started taking part-time jobs and running an online store on my cell phone. Teachers didn’t care because they knew my condition. Except my english teacher, she warned me twice not to use the cell phone in class or she will throw it out of the window. And she did. I jumped out of the window to get the phone. From the third floor. It was so weird that after I hit the grass land nothing broke inside me. But the teacher was in great trouble. She was dismissed by the school for the incident.

I felt very sorry for her. She was a responsible teacher and I liked her more than others. So I decided to visit her the last day of school. Her apartment was not far, just two blocks away from the school. I rang the doorbell, but she was not home. I was a little disappointed.

I still felt like wandering around, so I headed for the bar. After the bankruptcy I went there once in a while. I looked pretty mature so they didn’t bother me. It made me feel like an adult. A sense of accepting failure.

I walked into the bar and sat down. I was about to ask for a drink before I saw her. My english teacher, sitting on the same side of the table, drinking alone. So I sat next to her and greeted her.

”Hey, jumping boy.” She looked at me and greeted me back. There are some tear stains on her face, her eyes losing their focus. “How are you doing?"

"Listen” I said, “I am sorry about----"

"Have you heard of a proverb in Caloran”, she interrupted me, “The better you live, the faster you die. Lucky you. I bet you will live a long time."

"I am sorry about your dismissal. I truly am. You shouldn’t have cared about me so much. You should have let me be.” I finished the sentence in a breath, for fear that she would interrupt me again.

She paused. Then slowly she spoke, in a weird, singing tone. “I am not sad about myself. I am sad about the trees in Mississippi. Do you know the taller the tree is, the more likely that it breaks in the wind? But all they want is to grow fast and tall. Pathetic.”

She was drunk, I thought to myself. I was going to get somebody to take her home. So I stood up.

”Wait.” She stopped me before I exit. “Don’t grow too fast, dear. You might break.”

I walked out of the bar to call somebody to help my teacher. In the sunset I saw a group of children digging a hole in the ground, claiming to reach the other end of the world, where they will become pirates, spacemen and soldiers. Beside them, a Mississippi almond tree bowed gently in the wind.