“Taking Shape: The Personal Essay” at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, MN
The nerves were focused in my hands. It was the second to last day of school. A shortened class period and I hadn’t practiced. I had read the piece over and over and over. A hundred times for every time I had begun working on the project. A hundred times to make sure I had the facts right, only for them to remain confused and jumbled. And an extra three times to try and pull out what my teacher had found when she handed the assignment back, and in her messy, green, half-cursive half-print handwriting, she had written on the front page, “The best piece you’ve written so far.” But during the two months that I worked every day on this piece, it had never been read aloud. It hadn’t come alive yet.
There was no reason for me to feel this way, but here I was, standing in front of the class, reading my piece aloud to my circle of peers. My voice tumbling over the easiest phrases; “river” became a foreign word, and the swear words flowed out like paint falling from a bucket. I screamed at myself silently; I had forgotten how many swear words I had put in this thing.
Each paragraph had ten remixes just trying to figure out which sentence should come first, which event occurred first. A part of me is still upset that there was no clear line between the two stories. They merged into one messy forest of experiences, and I was lost among the trees. When the stories sit next to each other, their roots mingling and their trucks growing together, they are the same, but when you pull them apart, the story is missing a limb.
I sat the stapled group of papers back on the table as I raised my head, and the last words fell from my lips. I connected eyes with a friend, and all I can remember from that moment is two things: her wide-eyed stare, and how the claps shook the floor under my feet, rattled my heart, and pulled my mouth into a smile.