My Personal Essay
This quarter in english, we were given an asignment to create a personal narrative essay about something that we felt described us or contibuted to who we were as a person. In my essay I chose to describe a walk in which I experienced an epiphany, that changed the way I viewed dreams forever... Enjoy!
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Once Upon a Walk
Everything was finally back to normal. Yet it wasn’t normal in any sense of the word. The oxygen particles floating around my cheeks were much crisper and clearer in their stagnant parade, than they had been all day. Each consequent breath was so soothingly unexpected to the scorched insides of my lungs that it almost stung in contrast to the previous. All the bright lights of the day had retired, there were no rushing strangers racing or pushing past me, no solar oven boiling my insides; just me and the moon. It was a perfect summer night.
My eardrums pulsed from the silence which consumed the entire scene. Yet I was neither scared nor tense. Usually, the only time I can tolerate complete silence is when my head is in the Sandman’s coma. And I was positive that I was not asleep. But this particular night, the silence created a symphony of its own. My footsteps created a backbeat for the soloist swooshing noise created by the friction between my arms and shirt. It wasn’t just any song; it was my song.
The pavement was still sizzling from the overbearing temperatures of a stereotypical Californian summer day; if you looked close enough you could see little puffs of steam evade the sidewalk where the sprinklers had spread their crystal jewels. Tiny droplets of liquid lay sprawled out over the grass fields making it seem as though there was a whole new radiant world coming to life through the glimmer of the moon.
Despite my involuntary bodily shivers in response to the low number of degrees, there seemed to be a small fire, although extinguished, radiating it’s heat inside of me. The warmth of the air may have gone down significantly, but the sidewalk was still beaming in warmth. How could I pass up an opportunity for this complete satisfaction? I leaned against a stray street light and removed my exhausted and chafed sandals and let my toes sauté upon the pavement; the perfect balance.
As my legs continued, step by step, down the avenue, I found it impossible to recall any of my prior stresses. For the first time in over a month, my to-do list seemed to disintegrate in a symbolic campfire in my mind. And even as I strained to retain all that important information, my conscience seemed to have begun roasting marshmallows over the flames.
As the fire in my subconscious burned, the temperatures outside proportionally decreased with time. Resting on a small colorfully decorated bench I had once contributed art to, my mind was cleared of all extra details and I was left with only the thoughts of all my forgotten dreams. My attempts at clothing design, website creation, photography, architecture, movie making, and novel writing filled my mind. All those projects I was so passionate about at one point, the activities I was ready to devote my life to. All these things I reprioritized as insignificant once more ‘important’ things came along. These were the little chunks and pieces of myself that I simply gave up without even thinking twice.
At one point, these dreams were exactly what defined me as who I was, not my grades. I spent, and even wasted my time, on the successes and failures of my own hopes and dreams, created exclusively by my own imagination, not the successful dreams of others that I had began spending my time on extensively for academic purposes. The second that I gave up my own ideas, my head became an attic for how to manuals, and textbooks, not discoveries.
A frosty breeze danced across my skin, leaving a sense of anticipation and emptiness behind it. The moon may have not been full, yet it shown stronger and more concentrated than I had ever seen the sun. It was then I realized that the worst thing I could do, was to forget my dreams. There would always be more things to learn, more things to store in that mental attic of mine. But throwing away my own hopes and dreams is like throwing away parts of who I am. One of my priorities must be to, at times, just clear my head of what isn’t mine, and see where that takes me.
I wish I could honestly say that the second I walked back into my house I was a changed person, someone who never prioritized incorrectly or forgot about dreams. I cannot. I can say , however, that when I did finally get back inside, I went straight to my room and wrote down all of those unfinished projects I remembered. And although it may not be any day soon, one day I will finish my list, and no longer will I call it unfinished.