I Still Don't Know the Right Answer

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“Let's pair up.”
I had a lot of resistance to these words.
To be honest, I'm not good with them.

If someone says to me beforehand,
“Hey, let's be partners.”
I will answer,
“Yeah, sure.”
But I can never be the one to ask.

What if they've already decided with someone else,
and I get rejected?


What if they didn't want to be
in a pair with me in the first place?

Such thoughts cross my mind.

Furthermore,
what if I'm not the kind of person people want to ask?

Anyway, making pairs makes me anxious.

There are children who can't say no.
There are also children who don't get chosen.

When I was a student, I wanted the teacher to decide.
I wanted the teacher to just say, “I've already decided!”

So when I became an elementary school teacher,
I would agonize over and decide the pairs for important situations.

Thinking that my perspective alone
might be biased,
I made sure to have
another teacher check them.

I had one wish.

I hope no child ends up alone.

I hope there are no children who, like me in the past,
find the atmosphere of having to form pairs
painful.

However, this is just my way of looking at it,
and it's not necessarily the right answer.

Could it be that I was
taking away the children's right to decide?

Children should be infinitely free,
and infinitely warm.

It might have been an adult's...
my own selfishness.


I still don't know which is the right answer.