Inner Spring

I want to chronicle my college career. Maybe that will stay here, or perhaps, when on May 1, 2011, I make the looming decision of which college to attend, I’ll have a fresh place—clean of past mutterings and ramblings—in which to chronicle the new beginning. For now, I’m going to feed parts of something I wrote last week to you.


The Groundwork: I am seventeen, a senior, I have applied to the three colleges that both satisfied my parents and my own picky standards, and I have just completed one hellish weekend of interviewing for an honors program that, if I’m accepted to it, will either take me to the Balkans or London in about four hundred and forty days. Give or take, because I’m really not counting—just tossing around numbers that sound slightly maybe almost-accurate.

Should I back up a bit? I am Avery, an ill-tempered, sharp-tongued, book-devouring girl who looks out at the world through cynical spectacles that I prefer to term ‘realistic’. My reading tells me that said jaded spectacles are due to my youth—an unfortunate stage of life in which all participants feel that they have seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and on the other side of it all, they decided, in their extreme naïveté, that the world is lacking and they are bored of life. (The same books which tell me this have been able to instill enough sanity in me that my thought process isn’t quite so dismal—I’m only half dissatisfied with life, and I happen to feel that I’ve seen far too little for my years.)

I love words. I love them. I love novels, I love poetry, I love essays, I love reviews, I love lyrics, I love dictionaries, I love thoughts, I love feelings, I love emotions, I love expression, I love soul. I love the rules of words, and I love breaking the rules of writing. I want my life to be about all of this. This is purpose. This what makes me get up every morning, what keeps me awake every night, what make me laugh and cry together, what makes me connect, what makes me love. Words make me _____. You can just fill in that blank at will.

Or maybe I should just omit the blank and leave the words alone.

During that weekend I mentioned earlier, I had many encounters with the spoken word—hardly my strong point. Oh, I can write a good speech; I can compose a good conversation. I cannot deliver either. Fortunately, the ordeal started off with written words in the form of a timed essay: one hour to evaluate and discuss a statement, and then write a polished second draft. I’ve got this, I thought. After all, I do intend with my whole being to be an English major. I stared down at the statement I was to evaluate where it perched in deeply black font on obnoxious bright-blue paper. “All’s well that ends well” stared back up at me. Shit. What was this, the SAT? I write! Don’t give me some proverb or cliché saying—give me an author to contend with. Of course I don’t agree with this simple quip! What in life could be so simple? There are always complications; it’s what keeps writers in business.

I spent the hour writing and revising a pointless essay that drew from a novel that I had had read (and hated) a year before. My soul was flat.