‘76

Frolicking in the field, riding my scooter around the yard, which was lined with flowers, concrete, and clothing racks, and reading twenty pages of a book every day was on my spring break plan,–if I wanted to finish that book for the third time before school resumed.

But a As I reached the second part of Fahrenheit 451, bringing a notebook, colorful tabs, highlighters, and sticky notes became natural to my twelve-year-old self as I read outside in the blinding sun of April. I wrote full essays on what could’ve been, the importance of Mildred and the juxtapositions between the “odd” ones and her, and the inevitable degeneration of our own world.

Those nights, peering outside on the dampened grass, holding a lighter in the dark, the world seemed as if it were brought to a standstill for a moment. The wind passing by, I watched the street lights flicker near the stone wall as the wind passed by. I held my breath and walked inside, pretending it was past midnight, imagining the cold shock of discovering that someone curious could be outside.

Then, there was walking outside, on the street, near the abandoned houses that had streaks of red and cars with gray covers and weeds that were up to my waist. The occasional noise of cars pulling over or driving past, or of crickets, was clearly audible—there was no sign of human life closer than the cars a mile away on the highway.

In the evening, a notebook that had been closed for over a year was pulled out, an online file featuring analysis on “The Most Dangerous Game” was opened, and eyes that hadn’t seen her own creation in three months saw a sixty-five page document that had one promise written all over it: to “finish” somehow, to find a “perfect” ending, so that its owner would be satisfied.

—

This was probably the last time I’d want to analyze literature, I told myself, only one year and one month after that endeavor—that spring break. After one (and a half) years of living in the honeymoon period of well, loving English, I was looking at a moment of uncertainty that could destroy it all.

I knew that perfect wasn’t possible, but it described exactly what I wanted to be. And looking at those sixty-five pages, the only action that could fulfill my sense of urgency when I was anticipating a test score was … adding to that document. It would be, after all, an opportunity that I had been putting off for months—to be able to finish a glorious project on with a sixteen-page story …

And I scrolled back months of writing—months where I had woken up early, written two pages in fifteen minutes before school, months where I’d come home excited because I just had an idea that would require a two-hour indulgence in Britannica. I stayed up five minutes—or maybe thirty—past my early bedtime, pledging to myself that I would sleep “soon” …

When I first started, I was afraid of being cold-called in class and struggled to convey my ideas—the very ones I began to compile—but it quickly expanded into a “project” I refused to leave “unfinished,” whatever I chose for that to mean. It evolved from disorganized thoughts to fully formatted “essays” with full bibliographies which were placed in different tabs of the document because I wanted to reach a number that didn’t leave the document “incomplete,” even for one night.

If perfect wasn’t attainable, I do think that I got quite close there—not because the writing was flawless, but because the motivation behind the analysis was genuine and stitched together by frames of my own memory.

And I scrolled back to February, which is when I had taken this test on my favorite book, the one I sacrificed hours and plastic tabs and pen ink and pencil lead, where I clearly remembered writing something that hardly addressed the prompt at all—one sentence that I thought would ruin the other twenty-five. And in March, I took another test where I thought I did better on than the other one, but I ended up doing worse than on a different test where I didn’t study, missed almost every class in that unit, and was already incredibly stressed because I had two consecutive tests.

All of a sudden, two months later, I was staring at a literature grade that didn’t feel like mine any longer. And on my desk there lay the book the February test was on—the one that blew me away with exquisite allusions and harsh truths, the one that elicited my excitement about the unsettling future of humanity.

There were only a handful of assignments that were graded, but that March test dragged down my average by six percent—a six-percent drop from the previous trimester. But because the trimester was ending, the test I took three months prior, in February, would have been graded that night.

Judging by my conscience, which I could argue is not usually wrong but might misjudge occasionally, I was almost certain that the test in question would ruin my grade, and, by extension (because I subconsciously connected my grades to my personal worth), my love of English would suffer.

And so I returned back to the document I might as well have called home for months—since September, when I started analyzing General Zaroff because I needed a mentally stimulating project to engage in. Initially, when I didn’t yet know what the future would hold, some of what I wrote was jokes, comparisons, and projections, but it spiraled into actual analysis that only became more complex starting from the tenth page.

I stopped in March because I had thought that I ran out of prompts to write on and that my previous ideas would be unmatched, but knowing that the last day I might want to write on it was so soon, I thought that I had to finish grandiosely. It was, after all, only my second-most ambitious project.

I stared at the blank page for a few minutes—I had written about standards of civility, handsomeness in the context of civilization, war trauma; what else was there? So I cleared up something that was never truly explained despite being hinted at several times throughout the sixty-five pages—what morality means to all of us, another larger-than-life idea I hadn’t paid much attention to.

And just because I was too unwilling to force myself to lose something that I actually enjoyed, I started by writing that I hadn’t added to it in months. I wrote that this was essentially a farewell to this project—a monumental project that I never intended to reach so many pages but was now pleading myself to generate more analysis (preferably the kind that contained quality).

I wrote a thesis without realizing that it would be my central argument for the next hour and a half. I left a side note about how the subclaims were awful but could be fixed later, cautious because perhaps, looking back at the thesis after an hour, it would seem “wrong” or “not polished enough.”

An hour later, I simply labeled it “thesis,” marveled at how my arguments held up, and continued collecting evidence.

For a moment right there, I forgot that I was doing all of this because I was afraid that a test would define what I wanted my future to look like. Hitting the seventy-five-page threshold was “thrilling” and “a challenge,” but it represented more than that at that moment—it was an admission that even if I couldn’t control how much I would like English tomorrow, I promised myself that I tried not to lose myself today.

It was a promise that though the future seemed grimmer and more unsettling than ever before, steadfast love can become permanent. It was a sort of reassurance that today’s writing could only have happened if I had yearned to complete a project that hadn’t been touched in months.

But it turned out that I never needed to write that adversity is the only way to learn to treasure anything or that words, when yielded effectively, contain quality that is unmatched, because I would be okay. I wouldn’t tie my achievements to my worth, mostly because that score was fine, and I would learn that pressure and competency are two different things almost entirely.

When I would learn that the score was fine, it’s not as if I exhaled a breath I “didn’t know I was holding” either—it was more as though I subconsciously expected that score and plagued myself with doubts just in case it wouldn’t be as high.

I didn’t realize that I had trained myself to expect greatness every time—to expect excellence even at my worst.

I looked at the seventy-five page document, where the last page was simply a letter to myself in which I wrote that loving something doesn’t always mean being committed to it—cherishing something comes in phases, some of which don’t last as long as we would like them to. Learning to take a deep breath, to separate my worth from what I loved doing regardless of talent…took too much of my heart.

Perhaps I lost the packet that had the story and some annotations on it—forgotten in the piles of assignments that were filed away in the official-looking cabinets in my room. But the online files lived beyond my room, accessible with the search of the title. It was as if destiny were pushing me toward the “end point,” imploring me to find closure and eviscerate the beliefs I used to have.

I wrote one last thought—one last paragraph that brought me to the seventy-sixth page, but I didn’t care that the number wasn’t divisible by five; I didn’t care that the number wasn’t a “round” number or one that pleased me aesthetically, for imperfection is sometimes all one can expect.

Words are sometimes the only things holding us together, and the capsules that hold them become magical if we actually think.

—

And all of a sudden, when it was raining at the end of May right after Memorial Day with the wind blowing the water in a million different directions, scattering the sunlight everywhere, no matter how polluted the water could have been, I waited free of the outstretched ceilings that tower over every hallway.

I walked in rain that wasn’t heavy, but glorious—it was strewn in my eyes and then at the back of my head and then going nowhere fast … And knowing that the entire world was in trouble but that vocal people can communicate in some sort of medium, I had to taste it, indulge in it—go around, trying everything at least once, or as it turned out, twice.

It tasted like nothing, but I knew that my heart healed. Just as I predicted it would.