When I am tired and busy for weeks and weeks I dream over and over about my teeth falling out. The internet says that that indicates a sense of powerlessness, but I know it indicates a certain type of fear, the creeping kind that always gets at me when there are not enough hours in the day and I feel like I’m not getting anything accomplished. I always wake up shaking with my hands clawing at my mouth.
I hate when I try to say something beautiful and it just comes out as facts. I wish everything I said fell out like water on rocks and was beautiful but usually it isn’t.
After grad school I want to build wells in Africa for a year, then spend some time teaching kids in Namibia, then marry a man like Anatole and move back to America to teach college in Arizona or New Mexico until I’m old and deaf. If I’m successful, my campaigns for saving Africans and promoting proper grammar will outlive me.
In the summer of 2005, I got up at six in the morning to protest “Love in Action”—a program that tries to convert (mostly unwilling) gay teenagers to heterosexuality—because I know that God loves everyone.
My middle school principal said no when I tried to skip the eighth grade, but now that I am skipping the twelfth grade he is saying yes. If he had said no again I would have done it anyway because I hate high school and I don’t need it anymore. College is what I need now and I know that beyond any doubt. My friends pout and ask me why I’m leaving them, and I say, “because I have to.”
When I get letters from universities telling me about how exciting it must be for me to be beginning to think about college, I laugh. I have been thinking about college since the fourth grade and actively searching since seventh.
No one will ever love me because I have a huge head. That’s probably not true.
I can’t strike a match.
My fingernails are soft. I know the sign language for “secretary.” I taught myself how to make an omelette. Before I die, I want to play Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods. I can’t dance but I do anyway. I love yellow roses.
I’m trying to define myself for you, College, because I want you to know what I’m here for. I’m here to study creative writing because the only thing that I know I will always love is words. I’m here to study history so I don’t repeat the mistakes of my ancestors. I’m here to learn every language I can because the only way I can be happy is if I go everywhere.
I am here because every time a teacher tells me I’m being prepared for the real world, I know that either I’m already prepared, or I’m already there.
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2 comments:
"I hate when I try to say something beautiful and it just comes out as facts. I wish everything I said fell out like water on rocks and was beautiful but usually it isn’t."
I love you.
(it's just about as awesome as Sara Stephens 250 times would be)
everything you say is beautiful.
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