Le Papillon

When I was 6, I had taken an interest to the French language. On hindsight, it was probably ignited by my obsession with Madeline, the cartoon. My uncle very kindly offered to tutor me and give me some very introductory lessons on the French language. To the curious ones out there, I have since stopped learning and I am inept in producing the /r/ sound. I can only say my Ps & Qs and count to three. I can say simple words like pomme, mademoiselle, madeleine, bon appetit. Don't try to get my to say croissant. I'd only be able to produce an abomination of it.
Moving on, I remember in that year, the movie Le Papillon was set to be released in theatres sometime at the end of the year. After seeing a newspaper advert for the movie, my mum promised me that she would bring me to the cinema to watch it. I can't recall if I was very excited for it. I know that there was some level of excitement, but I can't recall how high that level was.
Anyway, 2002 came and went. Le Papillon was released. After a couple of weeks, it stopped showing. My time to watch it had come and gone, but it had completely slipped my mum's mind. I turned 7 and had yet to watch Le Papillon. A couple of months later, my mum realised that she can broken her promise. That was my first broken promise. The first time anyone had made a promise to me and broke it. I will never forget it. I don't mean that I still hold a grudge against my mother about the movie. I don't. Eventually, I got to watch the movie when my mum tried to make it up to me by renting the DVD from the store to play it at home. But I will never forget this broken promise as a reminder for myself, not to make promises I cannot keep. I take the word promise very seriously. All my life, I have tried very hard to keep every promise I have made. I can probably count on one hand how many promised I have ever broken. (The biggest one was probably leaving church, but that's not a story for today.) I don't like to agree to things or discuss things that I don't think will happen. (i.e. when my friends say, let's go Fiji, and Whitsundays, and ____whatever country). I don't think it will happen so I don't see the point of raising my hopes and their hopes. Broken promises and broken agreements are soul-crushing, at least to me. It signifies a loss of trust in a person. Trust that took years to build up. That kind of trust can be broken in minutes or even seconds, when a promise is broken. And even more so if I have to break a promise that I made. I try so hard not to, because to break it means that I lose a part of myself, I lose a semblance of consistency in my morals. I become inconsistent in my identity and values. I become a hypocrite. And I won't be able to live with myself very well, staring in the mirror wondering what happened to the girl who kept her word, because that girl fell off the bandwagon. And even though she may get back on, people will always remember how she fell, and predict that one day, she will fall off again.