"Oh hello, what a surprise, you here? I thought..." she hesitated, suddenly realizing about the last happening between them, the unpleasant event of a failed exam. She wavered a bit here and there with her hands, smiled apologizingly pointing to the room full of students waiting for her and escaped.

It seemed long ago, years and years, since the time I had trusted her, since the time where I thought of her as one of the very few teachers who is able to understand her students and who practice a relationship of strength and friendship. It was the last year in college, I studied mathematics and physics and she was one of my teachers I had nearly every semester straight from the beginning. She had courses in every phase and so every student knew her. She was famous and popular working with her was refreshing because she was full of energy, loved the themes she presented with all her heart and her way of teaching was quite "special". Most would have called it "chaotic" and "unsystematically" but I always thought it a very creative way, she produced new ideas and thoughts nearly every lesson and accepted this way of "randomized thinking" from her students, too. Project-work was full of surprises and unexspected results, we all forgot completely the time when we had our "creative hours".

My collegue told me about a talk he had with a student we both knew from courses. He was completely out of range. He wasn´t able to value his qualities and faculties any more. It wasn´t his habit to speak openly about "problems" so it must be a real pain when he went to my collegue. I immediatly thought of the exam. He wasn´t able to answer really easy questions of the basics. I myself was shocked, I thought high of his knowledge and now? I asked and he answered completely wrong. Talking with my collegue about we noticed that it was a complete misunderstanding at the beginning and because of my rough reaction, I know I´m impulsive but in this situation it really was quite wrong, he felt totally confused so that the rest of the exam was done. He had talked about the wish of killing himself and his hopelessness, his desillusion about his future and so on, my collegue just told me in short. But there was no way to change the result, and there was no meeting after this to talk about it, only another exam, in written form, where he recovered his brilliancy and had the best grade of the whole course. But I noticed that he avoided me the last days and never would have accepted a free talk with me.

I was taken aback, I hadn´t thought to meet her again, my brain was cleaned of her existance, I stood like stone, a frozen grin on my face, hearing her words but not able to understand them, it sounded like a foreign language. Her quick change from real surprise and honest delight to uncertainty and troubled hesitation and in the end a form of feeling ashamed and uncomfortable in my presence. Her words glided down and I stood, my feelings iced to ban the gigantic explosion I feared. Like stone - for the rest of my life.