I wrote this essay five years ago when applying to college and somehow it still fits. It’s a visual narrative about memory, movement, and meaning-making.
STONINGTON CT, 14 YEARS OLD
My sister and I, capsizing a sailboat for the first time. The ropes slip and the mast dips. That summer I read Letters to A Young Poet and start to notice everything around me. Lily and I, on opposite sides of the boat, lifejackets bobbing. EAST WEST HIGHWAY, 15 YEARS OLD
UPTOWN MANHATTAN, 16 YEARS OLD
I take the 37-minute subway ride all the way downtown. I am alone and surrounded by bodies spilling off cold plastic seats. Squinting at dotted underground maps. Staring at phones and shoes. People sing. People beg. People step past metal bars. I lose sight of them but I keep my subway card. A year later it ends up in a collage, modge-podged with old stamps and plane tickets onto a suitcase sculpture about the things we carry, the places we’ve been. I save it all because I don’t want to forget.
BUS STOP, 16 YEARS OLD
It’s November. The girl I babysit walks off her bus and she looks so much older that there are tears in my eyes. We walk up the hill to her house, play Uno. Eat cheddar bunnies. I read the New York Times as she plays kitchen. I start collecting magazines, cutting up the New York Times, going to flea markets every Sunday. I hold onto receipts, tickets, notes, used calendars, even gum wrappers. I arrange them into pieces to look back on.
HAVANA CUBA, 17 YEARS OLD
We’re always moving. This time in a royal blue vintage Ford Fairlane. That Spring I write a poem called “The Drive Home,” about traffic painting the sky. Rush hour red. I start taking photos of my friends in cars. Looking out windows, sleeping, most often not knowing what I’m up to. I name the series “Friends in Cars,” describe it as a homage to the in betweens, a way to find meaning in the mundane.
BEACH BIKE, 17 YEARS OLD
Wood paneled cars, stone walls. My grandmother’s attic. It’s foggy. I read old letters, cursive on French postcards. There are boxes of old film slides of marriages, vacations, dinner parties. Old quilts, museum pamphlets, pockets of memory. It’s the best flea market I’ve ever been to. I sift through it all. I learn that everyone has boxes of moments they hold onto. EAST WEST HIGHWAY, 17 YEARS OLD
Flash flood warning, it rains for two months. I cry at red lights, I take too many naps. Nothing is wrong but everything is, traffic signs are fuzzy and the windshields move swift. I’m fine I swear, I cut the magazines in half. There’s an angel next to a globe, swinging a baseball bat. I collage layers of time, to remind myself I’m just a part. Three months down the road, there are blurry brake lights in my verse.
HERE, NOW
Still holding onto everything I can. Still putting the pieces together to give them new meaning, to give them a space. To help me make sense of my experiences. To remember how I felt at fourteen, falling off a boat. And at sixteen on the subway. To remind others that they were once sixteen. We look back to assign meaning to the rain, the road, the ropes. To understand it all. To be okay with it. We’re never going to stop moving. We’re never going to stop looking back. I never want to stop creating.