A Little Like Spaghetti

I used to have this teacher in Primary One. She was my Chinese teacher and my form teacher that year. I suppose she didn't consider me a bad student - just one who didn't apply herself enough. I managed to top my class in Chinese every test - if you counted from the bottom. She didn't want to force a young kid to study or anythng I suppose but in some ways she tried to motivate me.
I remember mostly the times she came so close to scolding me that her face went all red and she had to hold her breath before letting it out in one huge sigh as if to release all the tension in her body. And the times afterwards that she personally volunteered - or rather, took it upon herself - to retie my hair which has always been and will always be in a state of disarray comparable to an estate recently ambushed by a mega hurricane. Her hands gently combing my hair together and pulling it into two slender ponytails (a puerile style I didn't mind then) seem to flutter even now, gracing these locks which by now have replaced the actual ones those fingers once condescended themselves to. And it's at times of reminisce like this that I recall the real weight her work-calloused digits have carried in my life and in their own. For she must have worked long and hard to see potential in a little girl when everyone else just saw trouble. Trouble in the form of unstoppable daydreams and absentminded spells. Trouble in the form of stubbornness and immaturity. Trouble in the form of messy hair and unkept fingernails and generally the impression of stupidity.
But I think back now and I wonder if even she will be able to recognize what her little mess has become.