I knew a boy once, from school in the second grade. He was well-built, around my height, and caucasian. He also had a great, big smile and accompanying deep laugh that he treated his friends and classmates with. Yet  whenever he saw me, his cheery facade peeled away to reveal a deep scowl. Every time I registered in his sight, he would direct the facial affront toward me, seemingly without reason or respite. I felt a little hurt by the hostility, but was oblivious for weeks after our initial encounter to the fact that he was scowling at me because of me.
 

The boy (whom I’ll call “Jac”) always seemed to find something to hold against me. A word that I had said; my score on a test that I had studied hard for; the home-made noodles were my lunch (I am Asian-American); anything and everything that gave me a feeling of happiness was tainted by the venomous tongue of Jac. He gave me a sneer of disdain every time I passed him in the hallways at school and hissed out an insult when the teacher wasn’t looking. Sometimes he would be caught in the middle of a taunt and sent to the principal's office, but this tactic would only buy a brief respite of a day. I feared him: the demonic whisperer that lived in the form of my classmate.
 

On and on it went, the endless cycle of torment. My hurt, under constant malice and pressure, crystallized into anger and eventually, became hatred. Jac’s words, once painful, simply became aggravating. Instead of avoiding my tormentor’s gaze, I found myself returning a stare almost equally disgusting as his own. Finally, during a recess in fourth grade, I decided to face my worst enemy.
 

I had always imagined a feeling of triumph upon tromping Jac’s arrogant behind. Yet as I laid my hands on the bully, no such feeling came. No satisfaction was granted to me; I was only sated, as if the emotional pit in my stomach had been filled with some foul, souring lard. I had expected to be glad about my decision. Instead, I found myself more eager to release Jac than I had been to grab him.
 

I wish I had tried, really tried, talking to him. Maybe he would have been nicer to me, as he was when I apologized to him after the fight. Maybe we would’ve been better classmates, if not friends; we would’ve surely at least respected each other, as we did in the aftermath. Maybe the fight with Jac wouldn’t exist today as one of my deepest regrets. The difference of those few unsaid words, I am sure, would have amazed me.
 

Everyone in this world has felt or suffered from hate, no matter how long or how. Yet within that horrid, hellish crucible, people can find that the solution they have always been looking for has always been there for them: the understanding of each other, uncovered by words.