Work Text:
To no one’s surprise my most hated aspect of school growing up was homework. I could narrow down the world around me until everything but my paper was an insignificant blur, but it would still take me four hours to complete what my brother finished in thirty minutes. Reading was the reigning champion in my colosseum of misery. At least with math I could watch YouTube while I worked, but reading held me hostage. It forced me into a thirty page long prison and yelled at me that I couldn’t have fun until I spent the rest of my evening on it. So, naturally, I blew it off completely and asked my friend the next day what the chapter was about. I liked stories, but there was no way I could get invested in a story if it was in a book. That was the way I approached all literature for years, until junior year of high school.
My shoes dug invisible footprints into the carpet, hidden by the dark room. My face was illuminated by my phone screen which read 6:30 AM. It was the same time as when I checked it ten seconds ago. My impatient fingers tapped from app to app as I waited for my brother to finish getting ready. I needed to be in the car. Not because I was an amazing student who wanted to get to school, I just liked listening to music and daydreaming out the window. My imagination was a beast that needed to be satiated constantly. It had to be fed little treats of art, music, or any other form of expression so I could push it back into its den for a few hours and get schoolwork done.
My brother emerged from his bedroom and promptly moved towards the front door like he was the one who had been waiting on me. I trailed behind him, buckling my seatbelt as he put on his music. My headphones began thumping against my eardrum with their own tune, but before I could even blink, we were already at school. Begrudgingly my shoes left the safety of the car and crunched across the frosted grass till I reached the heated inside of the building. The school still had an hour before starting, so I sat alone in my classroom soaking up the last few minutes of alone time before my other classmates trickled in. Oddly enough though, they didn’t. I bit back the urge to groan as I checked again what day it was. It’s Wednesday. Today is chapel. Kill me.
I slipped my phone into my bag and slung it over my shoulder before dragging my soulless husk of a body towards the gym. Two lines of cars were formed outside now that it was closer to class time. Each had tired parents kicking their kids out of their cars so they could squeak out enough time to get a morning coffee before work. One line was for parents with little ones which, once out of the car, filed towards their respective classrooms. Meanwhile the line of middle and high school kids meandered towards the gym at the pace of someone who wasn’t actively blocking cars from leaving the parking lot. I, unlike the others, gracefully and daintily speed walked towards the entrance, waving an apologetic hand in every direction until I was inside.
When finally my labored breaths from climbing up the incline of the hill that the gym was perched on were no longer made visible by the wintry air of the outdoors, I was tasked with climbing Mount Everest in bleacher form. I stretched my legs over bags and in between people until I reached the last empty seat at the top. I looked jealousy to my left where there was someone who wasn’t me sitting in the little corner between the wall and the built-in referee stand. It was the best spot to hide because no teacher could notice that you’re not standing for worship when a crowd of people tower over you. As it got closer to time, I bemoaned at the realization that my friends weren’t coming today to at least make the suffering tolerable. Having to go to Christian school when you aren't Christian was painful enough, but to not have your friends to shoulder the misery with made it downright tragic.
You’d think I’d love chapel: perfect time to retreat back into my mind and drown out the melodic vitriol, and if that was possible I probably would have loved it. Unfortunately, it was not. My hellbound soul must have crossed God itself at one point because no matter how many attempts I made, I was chained to the present. My ears were pried wide open so none of their messages about the corrupt and woke world we lived in could slip past me. After over an hour of venom being poured down my throat, they finally dismissed us for lunch.
I ate my lunch, each chew testing the limitations of my tired mind. I forced myself to finish my lunch as I listened to the conversations around me. We weren’t allowed to keep our phones on us. So even though mine was illegally in my bag instead of my locker, I couldn’t take it out to distract myself. Lunch couldn’t end soon enough, and when it was finally time for literature class, I was the first person to ever feel grateful to not have more free time.
My body slid into the less than comfortable plastic chair that I had designated as mine as I examined the piece of paper the teacher had placed at each seat. It read at the top, “ The Pie by Gary Soto.” Given that I had nothing better to do, I read it before class started. My eyes trailed from line to line only getting faster the longer I read. It went from a lazy sway to a rapid dash across the page, as I discovered this was the most vivid piece I had ever read. Mentally I could picture the champagne tinted, jammy filling and the large pie crust crumbs clinging to this boy’s cheeks as he stuffed his face with stolen apple pie. The work took me through every sense and on top of that, spoke to me in a way no other story had. Everything inside his one page world was framed by religion. It wasn’t that the author put his religious views in the text. It was that the younger version of himself did. Everything he did was framed by the idea of sin, the angels around him, and how God must be watching and shaking his head in disappointment. Nothing in the story’s events had to do with religion, but as a child God is just always there.
It felt like a written reflection of me, and how as a child the idea of God suffocated me. No action nor thought was free from his omnipresence. It spoke to me so intensely that years later I still remember it. It inspired me to not only read more, but to get my head out of the clouds and onto paper.
While not executed as masterfully as Soto, the next piece I wrote I tried to emulate what I had read. It was a short story for a writing club. We published it a few months later and I cringed at my failure to live up to my new standards. His work was so creative; it made me wonder if I was secretly a horrible writer and I never knew. At that time I had only written academic papers for school. None of them were ever poorly received. Once I was even held up as an example for the class, so I didn’t understand why now without the bounds of formality I was so bad.
I didn’t give up though. I had too many stories to tell to just call myself a horrible writer and never touch a Google Doc again out of shame, but in that same vein there was no decision to keep writing. There was no thought I would quit nor epiphany that spurred me on during my darkest moment. All there was was an unconscious inability to stop till I was satisfied. It’s my goal now to someday make everything I write as impressive as what I read that day in junior year. So that maybe someday when I’ve mastered my craft, I will finally be able to take someone into that place inside my mind that I can’t stop returning to.