I had a moment. 

You must have experienced them at least once or twice. When you feel that in that moment, you are witnessing something significant, something that life has placed out there to reach you and only you. It teaches you one of her many lessons and to ignore it, well, its a sad waste. Some people feel that the moments that really matter are those when happiness is abundant, when life is at its peak, I'm sad to say this but life's beauty comes in other forms.

Maybe you'll get me better if I explain the moment. I was typing on the computer, and my 11 year old sister, wanted to close the conjoining door to keep the air-con within her room. But the thing is, closing that door would cut me off from the wireless internet that my computer was using, as the frequency seems to travel through her room from the living room to where I was sitting in the master bedroom. So I had a stand -off with my sister. My foot refusing to let her close the door and her tugging at it. She was adamant at getting her way, but due to the superiority of my foot, no amount of strength coming from her would close that sliding door.

So there she stood, and there I sat in my chair. Me sitting there with an eyebrow raised in goading pride, and her standing there with her hand on the door, her face and eyes turning redder by the second; she glared back at me in an expression of hurt and anger. Then the tears started streaming down her face, two of them making tracks down her cheeks, straight lines that carved into her face as though they'll be the same way she'll cry years from now. Her face phased out as if I saw a reflection of what would come in the future. 

It gripped my heart. The image wrangling from me, not the emotion of guilt, but a profound and encompassing poignancy, that made me want to weep. In that rare moment, I asked her with such empathy and solemnity, that in any other tone would be ridicule.

" Why are you crying?" 

You might be laughing at such a question, but what I was asking her for, was the real reason for her tears. The trivial matter of the door had blown up to such proportions that it made her shed tears of anger. Looking back now, I understood the significance of the matter. She was angry because someone whom she thought would not bring her such grief, was denying her the simple ownership of her own space. Children grow, and as they grow, like we have, they create their own special private spaces. I encroached upon the sanctity of her space, its absolution in keeping her safe and happy. I broke her threshold, and for that faint moment I made her powerless. I also believe that this was the very same face, she gave to her enemies in school when she got bullied, when she was unable to fight back due to her very own passive nature. That look of distressed anger.

I think I was sad as I am now, that I had a small part in taking away her innocence. In that brief moment of quaint beauty, I taught her the meaning of betrayal and how safety is transient. It was a painful lesson, like how all lessons taught by rote usually stick. It brings to mind how she once asked me what was depression. I didn't tell her then, but when her pet rabbit died, and as she lay there sobbing in her bed, limp as ragdoll. I knelt down beside her and stroked her hair and told her that this was what depression felt like. 

I don't like teaching my sister these lessons of life. I'd rather that her innocence be preserved for as long as possible, and not be ripped away from her as mine was. But at least life gives me the opportunity to teach her, to teach me as well of the lessons that only experience can give. In small snippets so that the innocence does not cause her too much pain when it is shed from the spirit. 

As painful as these lessons might be, therein lies its beauty. You've seen these lessons before, witnessed the moments, if only you can remember what they were trying to teach you.