Loyalty is everything. I am loyal. My friends are loyal. To betray a friend is to be a traitor. That does not mean that one must always go everywhere and do everything with his friends but that he must be able to give support to them when they need it and not forget about them.

There was once a man who gathered his three sons together. He gave one of them a stick and said, “See if you can break this.” The boy easily broke it and none of them could understand what the point of the lesson was. Then, the man took many sticks and tied them together with a rope. He then gave the bundle to his other son and said, “Now see if you can break this.” When the boy failed, he passed the bundle to his other sons who were also unable to break it. Eventually, his sons said to him, “We cannot break this bundle of sticks.” He then told his sons, “One of you is easy to break, but if you stay together, then you would be harder to break.” It was after we heard this story that we decided to stay loyal to each other.


One of my friends is Vlad; he lives in Coney Island and goes to Lincoln H.S. He has long 1970’s style hair and a really deep voice. He is also a great guitar player and is always full of jokes. Another one of my friends is Andrew, the Brain of our modest group. Like a lot of brainy people, he is not very athletic. On the other hand, he is a great chess player and has the best grades from among us. (Vlad has the lowest) My third friend is Alex, or Sasha as we like to call him. His hobbies are playing video games and handball. We all have unique qualities which make us a powerful group.






However, as the years go by, each of us gets pulled towards his own path and we seem to become more distant. But that does not mean that we forget about each other. We all go to different schools and therefore don’t meet very often during the year. However, the time that we do spend together is during the summer when we all go to upstate New York. That was actually the place where we originally met. We used to spend entire summers there.


Our friendship is associated on trust; we always have each other’s back. I remember about two years ago, Alex got into a dispute with another kid. It was because we were playing soccer and the kid was cheating by attacking other players, his excuse was that “if they can’t play properly, then it’s their own fault.” The dispute was about to escalate into a fight, but when the kid realized that we were all against him, he gave up and we ended the game fairly. Disputes are not the only times when friends need support. I remember once, we were exploring the forest and Andrew fell off a rock and banged his food very badly. It was nothing permanent but we still had to carry him back to his house






Like the brothers in the parable of the bonded sticks, my friends and I are there for each other whenever we can be. Even when we are in school and we don’t see or talk to each other for months, we still think about what the others are doing.