The Weather of Memory

There existed in those days, within the sacred confusion of Wamrong Junior High School, a strange cultural practice called the scrapbooks.

Now, for the unfortunate generation raised entirely on mobile phones and social media, a scrapbook was (in this particular story) a dangerous handwritten object passed from student to student containing:

• favourite things,

• Favourite colours,

• favourite songs,

• ambitions,

• philosophies copied from magazines,

• and occasionally, emotional disasters.

A harmless invention in theory.

A weapon of destruction in practice sometimes.

Girls decorated their scrapbooks with flowers, stars, perfume, and handwriting so artistic that ordinary boys suffered headaches trying to read them. Boys, on the other hand, usually wrote things such as:

• “My hobby is football,”

• “Best actor: Jackie Chan,”

• and “Friendship forever.”

But hidden among these innocent pages often lived dangerous things:
feelings.

And our hostel menace of Class Eight understood many things in life:

• fighting,

• leadership,

• punishment,

• climbing trucks,

• intimidating others,

• escaping study hours,

• and being summoned to staff room every morning.

But love?

That subject remained entirely outside the syllabus of his existence.

You see, our school menace was not built for softness during those years. His emotional vocabulary mainly consisted of:

• anger,

• pride,

• laughter,

• loyalty,

• and destruction.

Anything beyond that confused him deeply.

And thus tragedy arrived in the form of one innocent scrapbook.

Somewhere during lunch break, through mysterious student networks more efficient than modern intelligence agencies, a scrapbook reached his hands.

He opened it lazily.

There among colourful handwriting and decorative borders, one sentence stood waiting like destiny itself:

“I like and admire him a lot.”

And the “him” happened to be our little school menace.

Now ordinary boys would have:

• blushed,

• hidden the page,

• smiled secretly,

• or lost sleep for three months.

But our menace reacted like a small dictator discovering rebellion.

His face darkened immediately.

The page offended him not because he hated the girl, but because he genuinely did not understand feelings. Affection embarrassed him. Vulnerability looked dangerous. Tenderness felt like weakness.

And worst of all?

The girl who had written it was the girls’ captain herself.

A respected student.

Disciplined.
Well-behaved.
Everything our menace was not.

The next morning before assembly, students gathered slowly across the school grounds beneath the cold Wamrong sky.

Lines were forming.
Captains shouted instructions nobody obeyed.
Teachers stood in distant groups discussing mysterious adult matters.

And into this ordinary morning walked our menace carrying the torn scrapbook page.

His followers sensed danger immediately and maintained safe distance behind him.

He walked directly toward the girls’ captain.

The poor girl probably expected many things in life that morning.
Public humiliation was not one of them.

Without ceremony, he held the page before her eyes and tore it slowly into tiny pieces and threw them all over her head like a snowfall.

The crowd fell silent.

Then, in the reckless emotional illiteracy of boyhood, he slapped her and declared before everyone:

“Don’t like and admire me again.”

The sentence itself sounded less cruel than confused.

Because the boy genuinely had no understanding of what affection meant.

Love to him was not romance.
Not gentleness.
Not beauty.

Love was weakness.

Love was confusion.

Love was disruption.

Weakness, confusion and disruption had to be crushed immediately before it spread like hostel rumours.

The girls stood shocked.
The boys looked half terrified and half impressed.
The teachers had not yet noticed the explosion.

And our menace?

He walked away calmly as though he had solved an administrative issue.

Now, had the girl reported him directly to the Headmaster, the consequences might have reached biblical proportions.

But she did not.

Perhaps out of embarrassment.
Perhaps out of fear.
Or perhaps because she genuinely liked and admired him.

Still, news in Wamrong traveled faster than forest fire.

Before first period had properly begun, responsible staff members already knew everything.

And thus, as fate demanded faithfully every morning, our hero was summoned once again to the staff room.

Truthfully speaking, the staff room had become almost a second home to him by then.

Teachers no longer asked:
“What has he done today?”

The more practical question was:
“What has he not done today?”

He stood before the teachers while they lectured him endlessly about:

• respect,

• kindness,

• girls,

• emotions,

• and proper behavior.

The words entered one ear and escaped heroically through the other.

But somewhere beneath the menace, beneath the reputation, beneath the foolish violence of adolescence, there existed simply a boy who had never learned what to do when another human being offered him tenderness.

And because he could not understand it—

he attacked it instead.

# posted by Sonam Phuntsho @ Sunday, May 17, 2026