Work Text:
The beginning of the next to last year of high school was as the girl had expected. Teachers introduced themselves, told them which were the books of their preference, and informed their respective evaluation plans, all this in a peaceful environment that made it difficult to identify falsehood from truth. Biology was not the exception, but for a tiny little detail, the teacher asked for a sketching notebook in which they would illustrate what they will see in lab practices, plus the next words:
"I would like you to write something about life on the first page of the sketching notebook. If it had a related drawing, it would be great."
This made the teacher, who in her opinion had made a good first impression, lose some sympathy points.
It is a fact well known by everybody how important is the image for a teenager -at least that's what they think-, so that, even though the teacher asked something quite simple, the students, especially the girls, were confronted with a challenge.
The first thing was to find the notebook. The market niche for these not at all especial articles is children in kindergarten and primary school age, not pig-headed teenagers, thus it didn't come as a surprise to the girl to find limited options at the stationery. The offer was reduced to two kinds of cover: a popular doll in all her glorious pink, whose image its makers got the advantage of ad nauseum in the most creative products, notebooks were not an exception; the other, with a black background, showed a collage of superheroes from a comic, in a fighting attitude, good vs. evil.
Of course, she chose the lesser evil: the black one; so much pink was harmful to her health. She didn't tell all of the characters apart, though the presence of some heroes she knew from a TV animated show, similar to a teenager's soap opera, flavored with people who could fly, throw laser rays through their eyes or make things float with their minds, was encouraging enough -she hadn't missed one chapter, to her mother's despair.
The second part was troublesome.
Dear reader, I can be sure that at this moment you’ll think: “Dumb child, just type life in a search engine and there you go”; then, you will ask yourself why to keep reading. If it was as easy as that, there was no tale to tell; in fact, I’ll give you thumbs up for leaving right here… But, as that is not what I intend, for this story, the year is 1995, only people with high incomes have a computer at home; the internet is in its beginnings and is, in general, for the use of big companies; the stellar apparition of smartphones, tiny miracle workers, is in the realm of science fiction; and don’t even speak of the magic of the Wi-Fi. Nowadays, you just type whatever is in your mind in Google, even complete questions if you don’t want to use keywords, and you got thousands, millions of references in seconds; copy + paste = homework ready. It wasn’t so easy back in that time, it was necessary to transform yourself into an investigator, to be an expert researching in books, to ask.
Let’s go back to our girl. Even though the time grew shorter, her mind kept blank. Existentialism wasn’t her thing, plus she was skeptical by nature and rejected any New Age belief.
There were a lot of books at home, however, the lack of poetry ones was compensated by a collection of encyclopedias, full of general issues; in short, nothing that would be of use. She came with the idea of asking her mother for advice, but their points of view were incompatible; besides, any self-respected teenager is always against her/his parents’ opinions. In the music department, her home wasn’t of much help either; among the different styles, just one song had the word life, and in the last place. Her luck wished it didn't suit what the teacher wanted. It was based on a poem from the time of the Spanish Civil War and talked of self-sacrifice body parts in the fight for freedom.
The last resource was to use a song she had listened to on the radio. However, this was another problem because the only way to know the lyrics of any song for sure was to hunt it; in other words, to be stuck close to a radio for hours, be lucky enough for it to be played in the chosen station and record it -YouTube? mp3? What is that?. The process took a time she didn't have, but most important, patience, tons of patience.
The Sunday before the deadline, the girl had resigned herself to copy the definition of life from the dictionary. Then, she stumbled -there's no better way to tell it- with the solution to her problem in the less expected place and time. She was at her aunt and uncle's home, at a barbecue. She was going back to the patio after leaving some dishes in the kitchen when she looked at the wall where her aunt used to hung handicrafts, stained glasses, little pictures, anyway, souvenirs from her trips. There it was: a ceramic plate, not larger than 4x4 inches. It had at least two years in that place, she had never paid any heed to it, however, in that instant it was as illuminated by neon lights.
Despite the fact she was tired and it was late when they came back home, she went straight to write the verse in the center of the first page of the damn notebook. She didn't want to wait till the next day, she wished to put aside the pain in the neck that had become the assignment, so she could sleep at ease. Neither she wait to draw -the only normal one she was capable of: a beach with a palm tree and little rocks spread in the sand, the sea, a mountainous island in the background, the sun hidden by clouds, a ship, birds flying that looked suspiciously like checkmarks.
The girl didn't think any more about the notebook until the first day in the lab. Seeing her classmates’ works made her start worrying; nevertheless, there was no way for her to change what she had done -neither the will. She didn’t pay attention to the boys’, but she noted the girls had been inspired, it was even one who used the whole page. And that wasn’t all, to her inexperienced eye, some of the drawings were works of art comparing them with her beach postal. Besides, most of them had been luckier in the covers department, they didn’t have dolls on it, but were more girlish.
After explaining the way microscopes worked and while the students played with them, instead of learning how to use them, the teacher took the time to check the notebooks. She seemed relaxed while she looked at them, satisfied by the results, but when she got the girl’s, who hadn’t take her eyes of the teacher, her face underwent a slow transformation till it showed surprise, not so much because of the external appearance of the object, but for what she found in its interior:
Don't worry
too much for life
because
you aren't going to
get out of it with it
The because wasn't in the original, though, the girl added it so it didn’t sound so final.