Narrative Visual Perspective in English

Listener Lyric Essay

The listener lyric is a poetic essay that helps the reader emphasize the subject. We read the book “Citizen,” and followed sample writing techniques to emulate this style of writing. For our own pieces, we interviewed somebody that has experienced something we haven’t. I interviewed someday that was depressed and at one point in their life feeling suicidal. I hoped to capture some of the complex thoughts and emotions through this essay.

Essay

Fire…

Your dad rushes you to the hospital. Your mind is numb. Empty. You bought the melatonin pills and two other random pills from the pharmacy the other day. This was your third attempt. You thought it would be all over by now…

It started as a small spark… No… It was a candle. It was a small bothersome light. A firefly in the dark. 

You knew it was there the entire time. You never blew it out. What’s the danger of a candle? The wax melts away. Droplets of tears. The candle is running out. 

You made a careless mistake. You wasted thousands of dollars buying the wrong tickets for the school trip. Classmates don’t look at you the same. Their stares surround you. 

The candle turned into a fire. Only a small fire. Sizzling on the wood. It’s calming to look at. But you know what happens if you don’t put it out. You can’t. You watch it grow. The uncontrollable yellow flares jump around like ballet dancers. 

Your friends pretend and ignore your problems, while teachers can only see a label. 

Your principal threatens to expel you from all extracurriculars.

Your boyfriend breaks up with you because you are emotionally unstable. 

The smoke fills your lungs. You can’t breathe. The fire engulfs the room. 

You don’t want to die…

Nobody wants to die…

But right now you are trapped between a scorching fire and an open window countless stories high with no way out. 

You don’t want to jump, but then you imagine the slow agonizing burn. 

Last night, you took 

that jump.

You weren’t supposed to 

wake up today. The empty 

bottles of pills linger

in the trash in your room. 

Maybe the smoke covered the stairway? Maybe someone was coming to help?

You lie on the hospital bed. Is the fire gone? 

Process and Transcripts

In order to get the information, we had to interview our main subject. My interview was one hour long. However, I provide a small portion of the interview below. This section shows where I got the fire metaphor.

Speaker 1: (00:00)

Okay. So do you want to repeat the metaphors that you told me? You asked me to jump from happy to deep the sec.

Speaker 1: (02:48)

Okay, let me read it actually. Cause this is word for word everything.

Speaker 3: (03:53)

I don’t want to die. Anyone else with depression or who’s been labeled as suicidal can vouch for this? We don’t actually want to die. It’s only after we’ve seen countless methods and people for help, but nothing has worked against the colossal growing pain fighting back that we have to turn to death sounds Riddick. But imagine yourself trapped between a scorching fire and an open window in a building 10 stories high with no other way out. Of course you don’t want to jump and and escape the fire, but you don’t want to suffer a slow agonizing burn until you die either. So when the fire grows and slowly begins to feel unbearable, you choose the window because death via falling 10 floors is a much better and faster option than death via being scorched to death. But still you didn’t want to jump, did you? The heat inside just became too painfully and tolerable. It’s the exact same with those who committed suicide. Those who have never been trapped between fire and an open window can never understand this feeling and those who are trapped right now, it’s so, so extremely hard to find an alternative way out, even if you want to.

Reflection

I learned so much from my interview. Mental health is a recent issue that is arising in lots of high schools. It was eye-opening to hear someone’s story and how they overcame their challenges. Some of their experiences were so impactful, I could feel their burden during the interview.