Annotated

Annotation

Where should I begin? Oh, there’s so much history. Wherever do I start?

***

The teacher was putting examples of student work up on the overhead projector – things that each child had written about what they liked best about Kindergarten. Most were standard four and five-year-old responses, pecked painstakingly letter by letter into the old Apple MS-DOS computer by one child at a time. One or sometimes two sentences on the paper, things like “I like the blocks they are fun” or “I like it when we go outside I like to play on the tire swings.” Then the teacher paused, looked directly at my mother, and said, “Some of our young ones are a little more enthusiastic than others.” The piece of writing that I had done, the same assignment everyone else had been given, was now up on the screen. It was two paragraphs long, with many spelling errors but hardly any punctuation mistakes. Everyone’s wide eyes turned to my mother, who smiled knowingly and kept biting the inside of her cheek to keep from bursting into laughter.

***

Once I started high school, things just seemed to pour out of me – poems, essays, and the like. I even completed a fiction story in the first semester of my World History class. Twenty-five handwritten pages, each filled front and back. My history teacher nearly had a fit when he realized that not one of the words were related to the Ming Dynasty.

***

One of my senior year duties as a Creative Writing II student was being in charge of putting together the portfolio of writing that our school sent each year to the Virginia High School League. When we got the results back, I was ecstatic: the portfolio as a whole had placed second in the state, and one of our poems had been ranked first place. It had to be pointed out to me that it happened to be the poem that the advisor had insisted on being included even though I argued that it wasn’t any good. It was my poem.

***

I enjoy writing and am an avid perfectionist about every typed and written word that comes from my keyboard or pen. Just ask anyone who has had to go and read a draft of my work through the various, overlapping copyediting scribbles.

***

I don’t try to be better than anyone else. I know that I can only be better than the bar I set for myself. But I feel as though when I’m reading what I’ve written that I’m being judged, scrutinized. That they can see through each allusion and metaphor into my private life. But then again, who can blame them – who’s not going to at least glance out of the corner of her eye when passing by an open door?

***

I write a lot. And by a lot, I don’t mean every day, although I really ought to be. When I do write, the results are usually long. I’m not one of those people that will just say something and leave you to draw some misconstrued opinion about it. I want you to see what I see and know what I know.

***

What do I see? I see a dress that I wore only once, ribbons tied into my hair that were unraveled and drooping before very long. I see the chair that I ran into during a particularly intense game of tag with my cousins, the same chair that I would stand on while helping my grandmother make dinner and then sit on while eating. I see the crocheted tablecloth that I helped put onto the table very carefully as my grandmother told me how it had belonged to her own mother a long time ago. I see through the door to the dining room, with its deep, plush rug that covered nearly the entire hardwood floor. I see the table, which used to be the perfect height to hide under at a certain age. I remember the chandelier over the table, and how my grandmother would take down the hanging prisms to clean them, holding them at a distance from the window and casting a small swatch of rainbow on the wall just for me.

***

I’m not trying to make everyone see the world through a pair of rose-colored glasses. I just want them to be my eyes and ears for just a few moments, maybe even causing them to think about something in a slightly different way.

***

Looking back on it now, I feel as though writing should have been not only my main commitment up to this point, but indeed my only commitment, seeing as it is one of the very, very few things that I truly believe I do well.