The Essay

 I had my fantastic English teacher review this so i don't make ridiculous errors. but tell me what you really think. what you reallyreallyreally think. not like you never do. but still. this is supposed to be giving a "flavor" of who i am, and if my voice isn't in this, or it doesn't reflect me, then i reallyreally need to know. much love everyone!

I can understand why someone would comment that we as a society are "owned by our objects". If we see a BMW and a Corvette parked in the driveway of a very large house downtown, we can generally guess what they make in a year and how many hours a week they put in. There are now entire thirty minute shows dedicated to sorting through a pack-rats collection of dust, laundry, and Elvis bobble-heads. However, I've come to learn, as I'm sure many before me have, that the smallest things mean the most. It's what seem the most insignificant that has the most meaning and the most moving stories.

I've always kept my birthday cards, ever since I was five. I would stick them into the corners of my mirror so I could see who remembered my birthday and the funny sayings. Recently, I've begun downsizing my room. I decided that my bulging drawers of clotehs and the pounds of paper and trinkets needed to be sorted through and given to people who could use them. In the process of cleaning out my bedside table, I found a birthday card. It was lavender and in a cursive script said "Happy Birthday Most Beautiful Granddaughter". I opened it up and saw that in the bottom left hand corner were the weak, barely legible signatures of my mom's parents. That was the last birthday card I received from my graundmother.

She died in March. He was in the hospital for her lungs, and she was going to be released in the next day or so. Granny was always in and out of hospitals for check-ups and a couple of procedures here and there. My family and I were never really worried that she would leave us in the near future. However, one morning my mom and dad got a call at about four in the morning, and so they rushed out of the house to Tuomey Hospital in Sumter south Carolina. A couple of hours alter, I received the call that she had passed.

It's been a strange experience, dealing with this kind of grief. As most people who have lost anyone who meanting something will tell you, it's not as simple as the five step cycle. when I started going through my things in July, I thought I had come to peace with it and moved on with my life. Granny wasn't mentioned as much, and wen she was, there was always a good story and a smile. Then I found the card in the very back of my bedside table. In the card it said "We love you, and we are so proud of what you have become, and what you are becoming." I cried.  I t was something Granny would say to me a lot. whenever I told her that I aced my math final, or that I was accepted into the Academy program, she would always tell me how proud she was.

My room is still in the process of being cleaned out. My drawers are a lot easier to pull out with far less shirts in them. My desk is neater and easier to dust every week than it has been for a long time. The fifty or so birthday card collection I had is in the recycling plant, except that card. That card is tacked above my desk, where I cansee it if I'm about to give up on studying for a test, editing a short story, or working on a research paper. "We love you, and we are so proud of what you have become, and what you are becoming."

It keeps me going.

Thoughts? I was typing this from my manuscript, so there may be some typos that aren't on the actual paper. the computer wouldn't let me copy without shutting down the internet. yes, it was annoying.

alrighty. well. happy friday everyone, and much love,
: - ) emilea

a poem inspired by the ink stains on my hands, written about the ink stains on some fictional boy's hands. (?)

these ink stains seem ancient:
close my eyes and I can see you, a thousand years ago
dipping a feather quill into an ink pot, scrawling
your every sloppy sentence and waiting for the words to dry.
You'd stare, marvel over their vulnerability

how they're not quite permanent.
You would try to be careful with them,
the edges of your fingers twitching
ready to give under the pressure of half-formed
phrases, stanzas. The lines in your head are always irresistable

in the end. Your hand would fall, leaning into wet ink
on yellow pages, and I'd watch you
write until every letter was impossibly
indecipherable to any eyes but yours.

When you handed me the pages,
though, I would smile, say
it's beautiful, because
it always is.

I know you, down to the crinkling of your eyelids,
the bend in your hair; how you're slow to smile, quick
to laugh. You close your eyes when you are angry
worried that a glimpse of your surroundings might make you snap.

You never cross out a single word when you write
and it comforts me to think
that without backspace keys or erasers,
you would stay the same.

There's a pattern of darkness here that could be
a fingerprint, if it didn't extend you your sleeves,
elbow deep. I hold your hands in mine: I could trace
these marks even with my eyes closed, till I memorize
the soft friction of ink stains over calluses, until I know
your hands by heart.


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um...
okay.
so, i think it gets very off-topic and that it may be confusing
and that it's kind of lame. And bad. And... um... eck. I like some lines. But I'm very very bewildered by what I have just written, my little third-first-attempt at a poem. So, tell me. What you don't like, and *hopefully* a word or two that you do.

finite.

an experiment in revealing too much

Because you guys are all awful and had to choose the one I didn't really want to put up here, here is part of a sort of essay-like thing I wrote about seeing my dad last weekend. It's definitely not finished and barely even edited in the slightest, and it was hard for me to put it up here, but I kind of want to know what you think about it. It's my first go at non-fiction, and I'm almost thinking it's what I'm sending in. It's the closest I have to a short-story. ~Heather


My stomach rolled and my eyes burned in the heat outside of the restaurant, but that couldn't be the only reason. Some credit was due to why I was there.

I kept replaying the one memory I had of him in my mind.

I was just a little thing, couldn't have been much older than two and running through his house (I couldn't call it mine, I never belonged to or with him) in a maze of white. We had covered the entire hall, living room, and bedroom with light-colored sheets and the sunlight shone trough, illuminating the world to my innocent blue eyes. Just faintly, I could hear my cousin laughing softly as she hid among the labyrinth and I tried to find her.

It was a game, you see. While he just sat there in a chair amidst the cloth walls, not telling a soul where the others hid, someone would run off and hide.

But they were always found or came out when the seeker was defeated enough to call "olly-olly-oxen free!"

He wasn't and didn't. Not for over ten years.

I could have called olly-olly-oxen free all my life if I had wanted to. Instead I just held that picture in a wallet under my mattress for nearly five years, only pulling it out if I had a bad dream and knew Amy was a sleep and wouldn't be woken by my ever-handy flashlight. Instead, I spent days forming elaborate stories of where he was and who he was with and what their names were and why he hadn't taken me. Instead, I cried every year on my birthday, wishing that I had two parents to celebrate with as opposed to just the one.

Then that call came last November and I ended up there at that restaurant, my stomach rolling and eyes burning. It took almost a full year to happen, but it did.

"I do not want to be here," my oldest sister, Natasha said.

"I don't either," Amy agreed.

They both looked at me. I shook my head and picked at my fingernails. "No."

But we were, all of us, ready to re-meet our father, or as Natasha liked to call him, the sperm-donor. When she first asked me about lunch with him, she'd said "The sperm-donor called. He wants to see us." She didn't even feel the need to pretend like she cared.

I cared, but I wasn't lying. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to have to be there. I didn't want to have to get to know my own father.

We had invited Amy's boyfriend, Robert, along as a sort of buffer. He suggested we wait inside where it wasn't so hot. So we did. They seated us at our reserved table and arguing ensued. Amy immediately snagged the inside corner of the booth side, Robert sliding in next to her, and Natasha took the same end on the chair side. The only place for me was either by Natasha or Robert, both of which would leave me with the possibility of sitting next to him. I asked please would they sit on the other side of me and didn't they realize that I was not going to sit next to him and couldn't Natasha just handle maybe sitting across from him because it had to be better than next to him.

They said no.


P.S. Anna (where are you, Anna??????), comment on Caroline's post, just there↓

max

so... first poetry that I've written since Governor's School.
Don't expect much. It's bad. I am way out of practice, and the words are all jumbled and screwy, and... it kind of sucks. But you are to workshop it nonetheless.

inspiration: max (clearly)/his brother's speech at the funeral/observations of the general reactions of people at school.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

but the brightest flames burn out so fast
ashes stain our fingertips, blunt reminders
frantic final attempts to grasp a piece of
you, or the concept, just as both
flickered out of reach.

Your name surrounds us:
encircling thin wrists in thick
black bands, and fingers trace
three letters, over and over;

lingering in the space between lips
kindly unspoken. You thread through our minds
rivers and highways on a city roadmap.

When unavoidable, it is muted,
muttered; a statement in whispers
for one quick syllable, it carries too much
reverance, heavy, grown out of itself.

Your name is the survivor's guilt behind half-smiles
wooden paintbrushes in a flower arrangement
photographs of a yellow bass guitar.
It's a quick elbow in the ribs-look up

to see how sunlight splits open cerulean sky
and the clouds are like a halo
existing only to sheild the brightest flames.


-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

suck suck suck suck

tell me just how much.

Application Time.

So, my dad apparently is on the mailing list for Fanfare (SCGSAH monthly newsletter) and then I saw this link that said 2009-2010 application and started flipping out and made him click on it. The link did not work and I had to sit impatiently at the kitchen table until he got off. Then I went to the govie school website and looked at the glorious PDF file that looks *ta dah* exactly like the one I used last year. But still. It has like, different dates on it and stuff.

I would advise everyone to go check out the personal essay topic so we can grouse about how they could have chosen a million interesting things and instead chose something that's just...well, lame.

Also, the little environmentalist inside me says not to print out the application because you're just getting one in the mail, anyway, and that would be a huge waste of paper and ink.

SO EXCITED AND ALSO SO NERVOUS AT THE SAME TIME BECAUSE WHILE I WAS PREVIOUSLY THINKING ABOUT GETTING IN, I'M NOW THINKING ABOUT NOT GETTING IN AND HOW TRAGEDIES THAT WOULD BE...

EVERYTIME I TYPE IN CAPS LOCK,
ee cummings kills a kitten. :(

So let's get working on that lame-o essay.
-Anna