A Risky Day: A Short Story

Have you ever felt puzzled because of wondering whether you should choose the safe path or a risky one? I know that this feeling is unavoidable for each and everyone of us in our daily life from normal things like choosing to go or not to go to school or workplace to something which has fierce impacts on our life. The story that happened to me was one of my milestones which I could never forget, and I still remember it clearly as if it only happened yesterday.

Let’s all of us go to the time machine and travel back through time to the year of 2014 which was also the year that our story began. In the middle of the school year in 2014, I was a ninth grader at that time. On a beautiful day where all the sunlight was dancing, an organization called

Then, my family members said that being patient would not give a disappointed end. And they were right, in the middle of August in 2016, my representative told me that a host family had picked me, and I needed to leave in 5 days. In that week, my parents took me to see all my cousins, friends and family members to say goodbye to them. All of them were proud and wished me warmest wishes. I could not hold back my tears of sincere gratitude and love toward them. It touched my heart and gave me longing to succeed in a whole new country. While I was on my journey to go to Corpus Christi, Texas which was the place where I would stay, unlucky things happened: I had to stay overnight in Los Angeles Airport because of the storm occurring in Dallas. In my mind, I was frustrated and dispirited so much that I just wanted to give up. In my head, there was a voice asking that why would I want do this when this thing might be completely out of my faculty. Fortunately, another voice raised up like an alarm clock wakening me up from those bad thoughts: remember at the very first place when you started this, you had reminded yourself that there would be difficulties, yet you would gain so much experiences and lessons when you broke the back of the beasts, and how wanted you were to learn more about other countries, finding your hidden values and made your family proud. As a

I felt afraid that there would be bullies or people who would laugh at me because I was a new student and an exchange one as well, I was not confident in myself, as a result, I decided to isolate myself. Even though people were being so friendly open to me, but that fear kept holding me back until one day, when I had a project in Mr Kring’s class: aquatic science. In this class, everything was fascinated to me, but among all of the topic, perhaps my favorite thing was doing the fish tank and recording their activities. I couldn’t describe how happy me and my group members were when we heard that we could start an amazing project like this. Unfortunately, preparing things for our species was harder than we had thought. We had to pour 46 gallons of water into the tank, and our fish required us to do more than just normal water. We had to put salt into the water, and for each gallon of water needed 2 cups of salt, so we stirred the mixture of water and salt together. The next difficult step that we needed to overcome was installing the filter and the air pumps into our tank. We had some struggles at first when we followed the instructions, and thankfully Mr. Kring came to help us to finish installing the filter and the air pumps. Finally, our tank could be started to have creatures living in. Our first creatures, 9 tiny hermit crabs, came