“Write about the happiest day of your life,” the teacher said.
This is the edict repeated in the classrooms, passed down the generations, every primary one student’s rite of passage. It is the only the beginning. As the years pass by, the prompts expand and multiply, different remixes of the same broken record: Write about your family. Write about a school experience. Write. Write. Write.
Ten years on, and I am tired of writing. There are only so many relatives you can have, only so many memories you can remember, only so many clichés you can use to describe an emotion you have long forgotten. I have run out of words.
After a while, you realize personal writing is an oxymoron. It is a fabrication, because we only ever remember emotions …show more content…
Too often, I have been asked to write about “what I have learnt from the experience”. What I have learnt is that understandings do not come in bursts of truthful, blinding clarity. There is no line between knowing and not knowing, no cusp on which I can unwittingly stumble over, no grand revelation of truth. My realizations did not appear to me in my head in a flash of light as the primary one me stared reticently at my paper, while an angel chorus sang odes to my wisdom; they were accrued over years of slogging over the same tired assignments, of tracing the same words on different sheets of paper. Years cannot be condensed into …show more content…
The sun is brilliant in a cloudless afternoon. It is seven in the evening and I am still in yesterday’s pajamas, leaning out the window to catch the midnight downpour in my hand. I am wearing a thrift shop dress, sitting shotgun in a car on its way to anywhere, thinking of greater things. I am thinking of tomorrow’s meal, of accidents and tarmac, of the universe and its impossible possibilities. I am thinking a thought that has already vanished into time and will never be thought of again, so that it is entirely and only mine. I am not thinking at all, but I am
This is the edict repeated in the classrooms, passed down the generations, every primary one student’s rite of passage. It is the only the beginning. As the years pass by, the prompts expand and multiply, different remixes of the same broken record: Write about your family. Write about a school experience. Write. Write. Write.
Ten years on, and I am tired of writing. There are only so many relatives you can have, only so many memories you can remember, only so many clichés you can use to describe an emotion you have long forgotten. I have run out of words.
After a while, you realize personal writing is an oxymoron. It is a fabrication, because we only ever remember emotions …show more content…
Too often, I have been asked to write about “what I have learnt from the experience”. What I have learnt is that understandings do not come in bursts of truthful, blinding clarity. There is no line between knowing and not knowing, no cusp on which I can unwittingly stumble over, no grand revelation of truth. My realizations did not appear to me in my head in a flash of light as the primary one me stared reticently at my paper, while an angel chorus sang odes to my wisdom; they were accrued over years of slogging over the same tired assignments, of tracing the same words on different sheets of paper. Years cannot be condensed into …show more content…
The sun is brilliant in a cloudless afternoon. It is seven in the evening and I am still in yesterday’s pajamas, leaning out the window to catch the midnight downpour in my hand. I am wearing a thrift shop dress, sitting shotgun in a car on its way to anywhere, thinking of greater things. I am thinking of tomorrow’s meal, of accidents and tarmac, of the universe and its impossible possibilities. I am thinking a thought that has already vanished into time and will never be thought of again, so that it is entirely and only mine. I am not thinking at all, but I am