Student Spectrums

Watching my sister read was like watching paint dry. It was boring and dull and frankly useless. Reading was something I didn’t bother doing when I could be playing outside with friends or watching my favorite movie. It made my eyes hurt and my hands itch and my mind beg to shut down.

However, as much as reading didn’t excite me, writing on the other hand was something I didn’t hate as much. I didn’t do it for fun but I didn’t resist much when given an assignment at school. An essay here and there didn’t kill me, and rather it made me like my sister, and that made me feel good. She wanted to be an author, and so obviously as a little sister does, I wanted to be like her. Not that it mattered much because I knew I’d never write for a living, and I stand by that still, but suddenly when faced with an uncontrollable anger, I sought an outlet.

An escape. 

My sophomore year of high school as I truly fell into my teenage years, I was faced with that rage that every teenager claims not to feel. I felt the room around me shake as I slammed the door to my room, tears streaming down my face and my mind in a haze. I felt the sudden urge to not just be angry, but to make it known. I felt the need to embed that moment into something real,something that would not be forgotten. Something that would live in this world far beyond my own lifetime. That is when I sat at my table, the surface cold because of its placement next to my window, and wrote my first poem. What it was about I don’t remember, but the feeling is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

That was the moment I felt the rhymes soothe my nerves as the anger washed away from my brain. I was comforted by the idea that this moment would live forever, and that it would entertain not just myself, but my sister too. She would read it and be as angry as I was, and then we’d sit and laugh about it and analyze it until the moon was high and the stars were bright. I read the poem back, over and over again, each time finding a new flaw, another word to be replaced. I sat searching and reaching into the depth of my mind for a word that fit just right.

A word that would need no explanation besides that in the dictionary.

A word to define that very moment.

At the end of my mission, I read my poem aloud again and again until my throat was sore and my voice was hoarse. I watched goosebumps rise on my skin and felt my stomach shiver in anticipation of reading my masterpiece to my sister. 

Reading back that poem now, I continue to change it and morph it into something new. I scroll through my saved past versions and thank God for such technology. Each version holds an evolved perspective on that same day, that same moment, and that same feeling. I see myself grow into the person I am, and at the same time cringe at my past self’s lack of literary knowledge.

Till this day I’m grateful to my uncontrollable hormones and always, to my sister, who listened for hours on end to me reciting my poems. I don’t think I’ll ever be known to the world as a poet, but that day I watched my lifetime shrink to that of a poet’s