During my elementary days I had this one memory I wanted to keep and review all the time. It's neither happy nor sad part of my childhood. It was a scene that still gives a big impact to my life until now. 

I was playing around my grandmother's house, then I passed by a forbidden tree 😅, a guava tree. I saw one guava that was fully ripe. Forbidden in a sense that it is my grandmother's keepsake, a lot of trees around her house was taken care of, especially fruit bearing one. She even put some plastic bags on the fruit that was about to ripen. She was keeping it not for herself, but to be divided among all of her grandchildren in our compound.  So when I saw that guava as a child, my instinct was to get it without being caught. I succeeded, I got the ripe, big, and very pretty guava that I saw, then after that I immediately ran home.

When I got home from my grandmother's house, just a few steps from ours, I passed by my stepmom. At the doorway before I was able to enter our house, my stepmom ask about the guava fruit I was holding. I was a bit guilty, but I didn't want to be caught, so to avoid the anger of my grandmother, I lied to my stepmom. I told her that i got it on the tree that I saw by the road. Then at that moment she knew I was lying, I wasn't good in telling lies even until this very moment. I felt so anxious I can't move from where I was standing that time. I knew I committed a mistake by stealing the guava, then committed another by telling a lie. My stepmom became quite for a while, then afterwards she gave me a sharp stare, I was so down but I can't admit it , I shouldn't…

After that sharp gaze of my stepmom she finally threw out some words, words that will be tattooed on my mind forever. I can still remember very clearly until today what she had told me that time.

"Ang tiwala pag nawala kailanman mahirap ng maibalik"

"Trust, once broken is difficult to mend"

I was stunned, that one sentence that i heard was so sharp, that even at my age that time I was able to comprehend and been hit by it so badly. I was so ashamed, and I can't look at my stepmom’s face. I know I did not commit a mortal sin; I know that it was just a simple mistake. But that moment gave me a big lesson in life.

Everything starts as a simple one, then it becomes grand through time.  It's the first lesson I learned from that experience. When you let that one simple mistake slip once, expect it to be more grand the other time around.

Then one more lesson I got from it was that trust is really hard to earn, when you shatter it, you'll be dumb if you're expecting to regain it fully…

Thanks for reading this. 😊😊