Perfection

“I’m a princess.”

A little girl, dancing joyously through the grass. Brown eyes sparkling, hair flying during twirls.

 

“I can do it!”

Eleven years old, trying her best to find her way.

 

“School is hard.”

A middle school-er matched with a sparkly pink backpack, finding the first cruelties of the world.

 

“No one likes me.”

An eighth grader sobbing, begging her mom for help.

 

“I don’t have any friends.”

An almost-sophomore told to join a group with someone she gets along with.

 

 “Maybe they’ll like me if I’m pretty.”

A senior in high school glaring at herself in the mirror wishing to change it all.

 

“No dinner, not hungry.”

A young adult, worrying her parents.

 

“I don’t need to eat.”

A twenty-year-old completely deaerating.

 

“I don’t care if I die. I need to be pretty.”

A doctor advising her to change, to be healthy again.

 

“I’m beautiful.”

A hole in the ground, a mother and father crying, and a weakened, peaceful face.

 

“I'll do anything to reach perfection.”

Six Word Memoirs

Drank and Drank and Remembered None.

Harris Burdick: Archie Smith, Boy Wonder

            Archie Smith was special. He didn’t feel this way, but it was true. Everyone flocked to him, wanting to get (and keep) his attention. Granted, Archie was only eight, but still commanded that air of importance.

            He, however, thought the complete opposite. Whenever started at, Archie thought he had something on his face. As he was surrounded and bothered, he thought that he was being made fun of.

            No matter who though that, there was no denying that there was something different about little Archie. The people adored him, and he could get away with anything he wanted. Not that he took advantage of that. When he was younger, and it was expected of little kids to get into things and wind up in trouble, no one even attempted to raise their voices at the boy.

            “Mama,” he would ask, his little voice like music to his mother’s ears, “can I go play outside?”

            “Anything you want,” she would reply.

            He always expected this answer, and almost always had back up questions. “What if I go jump on the cows?”

            “Anything you want,” was once again the answer.

            “What if I want to run away?”

            And the only answer he ever got was “Anything you want”.

            So he learned at a very young age that he could do anything that pleased him. Usually, Archie just took to staying indoors, playing with younger children, reading any books he could get his little hands on, and simply staring out the window.

            However, there was another thing about our Archie. He never told anyone, never even gave the slightest hint at anything anywhere close to it. Normally, he would tell anyone whom was willing to listen anything he wanted to say. He was an extremely talkative child that loved to hear and tell stories. But this was his own personal secret. After all, how would one – assumed to be in their right mind – go around telling people that they can see ghosts?

*  *  *

They came every night. Archie’s mother would tuck him into bed, kiss his forehead, turn off his light, and close the door behind her. Archie would snuggle deeper into his bed, eyes squeezed tight, and try his best to sleep.

He would almost make it. Just as his mind would drift off, a soft, gentle glow would fill his room. He would try his best to ignore it, but the light would only get brighter and brighter until he had to sit up and politely ask them to stop.

Little orbs would be floating through thin air, dancing around his little bedroom. They would whisper to each other, not paying Archie much attention. Sometimes he could pick up on their words, but typically, he couldn’t hear the repeated questions.

Although on this particular night, he could.

A tiny voice asked, “Is he the one?” And another tiny voice agreed. They didn’t stop after that, their excited chatter growing louder and louder until Archie had to cover his ears for fear of going deaf.

“Hello,” Archie called out, “Can you please tone it down and be quite? I’m trying to sleep, after all.”

After that, the voices stopped; the glowing did not. In fact, it got brighter, almost blinding, then stopped. All light was gone. There was no more chatter, no more sound whatsoever. A deafening silence filled the room, and the orbs were gone.

The next morning when Archie’s mother went to wake him up, it was found that Archie himself had disappeared with them.

Harris Burdick: The Seven Chairs

            When I was in fourth grade, my mom started dating her would-be-future-husband. Being the oldest, I was ‘made fun of’ a lot. Just teasing here and there, but it didn’t really help that I was prepubescent and moody.

            So, basically, her at-the-time boyfriend picked on me. He would pick and pick, and when I started getting upset and frustrated and on the edge of a freak out, he would simply say, “Jeez Bethany, don’t be such a bitch”. Wonderful thing to say to a ten year old, let me tell you.

            As soon as my sister could talk, she pick up on the habit. Now, my mom didn’t want her saying swear words, so her boyfriend eventually changed the ‘bitch’ to ‘witch’. And now, I can’t really seem to get rid of it.

            My granny even constantly says it. Whenever my sisters start being little brats and decide that they run everything, I will not hesitate to tell them what’s up. Of course, they laugh at me, tell me I’m evil, and that I should just ‘go fly on my broom’ or ‘go brew up an evil potion’. They gang up on me, and when I get mad about it, they laugh it off and tell me to lighten up.  If you ask my sisters, they will probably tell you that I curse everything, and that the fifth one ended up in France.

            If I’m being honest, every single time they say it, it kills me. It’s not that I can’t take being made fun of – because, trust me, I dish it out enough, I can take it – it’s that the insult takes me back to those years when I was constantly begging screamed at, and everything was somehow my fault, one way or another.

            I can’t say anything, though. My sisters don’t know what it means, in general, or to me personally. So I just laugh it off, as usual.

            But whenever someone says it to me, I feel that I’m no longer a seventeen year old who’s comfortable in her skin. I feel that I’m not enough, and I suddenly am twelve years old again, trying my best to find myself, but getting beat back down.

Lost (but not Forgotten) Letters

            When I first visited the second-hand bookshop, I didn’t expect to find much. A simple book or two, just something to keep my occupied for the next couple of weeks. What I didn’t expect to find, however, was a collection of old letters and poems stashed in between the pages. You can imagine my surprise when I was lying in bed, wrapped up all cozy in my blankets, and as I opened the first page, a piece of paper fell out.

            At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it. The novel was used, the cover torn and scratched up, and it was obvious that some of the pages were bent. It was just an old bookmark, I thought. A receipt or something of the sorts. But as I kept reading, the further in I got, the more pages there were. They caught my attention, and it kept it. Written in hardly legible scrawl, addressed to a Margret and signed by a simple ‘B’, was a love letter.

            That first night, I stayed up until the sun could be seen again. The letters fascinated me. Eventually I did feel guilty about reading them; they did belong to someone else, whomever this Margret was. At some point or another, I decided that she deserved to have them back, so this time whenever I browsed through the writing, I didn’t feel as bad.

            The letters never had a last name. Nor did they have another name – whoever was writing them only signed off with that B. For the next five days all I did was wonder about them, and how to find Margret. I was lying in bed on a Sunday, at three o’clock in the morning, when the idea hit me. Flipping open the front panel, right there on the very first page, was an address. It was, coincidently, only a few blocks away.

            On my next day off, I went to visit this woman, the letters wrapped together by a rubber band, tucked under my arm. When she opened the door, she looked exactly how I imagined her. Older, wrinkled skin, curly white-gray hair, with small circular glasses perched on the end of her nose. She blinked up at me, pursing her lips for a moment, before asking if she could help me.

            “Yes ma’am,” I replied. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be Margret?”

            There was never any surprise on her face. There was on mine, however, when she almost slammed the door in my face, shouting about how she already paid off her bills.

            “Ma’am, please, wait,” I interrupted her yelling, “I’m not here for any money. I was in a bookstore, and I think I found a book that belonged to you. It had these in them.” And I practically threw them at her.

            When she noticed the parchment, she froze. Her eyes widened, mouth forming an almost perfect ‘o’. Then she looked back up at me, tears forming behind the aged glasses.

            As it turned out, that ‘B’ was her husband. Before they even started dating, he would write her little letters, never having the guts to actually talk to her. At some point he must of, otherwise they would never have gotten married. They weren’t married for even fifteen years before he died.

            “The doctors don’t know what did it. One day, he just left me,” she explained. “We never had any children. He was all I had.”

            She had kept his letters in her favorite book. Somehow, after he died, it got misplaced, and ended up in that bookshop.

That night as I left old Margret’s home, I couldn’t help but feel ecstatic. Margret had lost the love of her life, but with my help, she was able to have a piece of him back.

Memorable Passage

Growing up, we typically hear the same old nursery rhymes. The Cat in the Hat, Little Miss Muppet, and so on. I feel that these simple little rhymes give us little hints as to what the world is truly like. In his story book “Just So Stories”, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem that I feel translates the ‘real’ world nicely.

‘I keep six honest serving-men

    (They taught me all I knew) ;

Their names are What and Why and When

      And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

        I send them east and west ;

But after they have worked for me,

         I give them all a rest.

 

I let them rest from nine till five,

           For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

           For they are hungry men :

But different folk have different view ;

            I know a person small –
She keeps ten million serving-men,

          Who get no rest at all !

She send ‘em abroad on her own affairs,

           From the second she opens her eyes –

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

           And seven million Whys!’

The world is not always fair. Some people (the What and Why and When and How and Where and Who) get all the luck. They can lounge around, laughing and playing, while everyone else (the million Hows, two million Wheres, and seven million Whys) have to constantly work. To some people, everything just falls into their laps. They get what they want, when they want it. Then there are the others, who have to work for what they want, and maybe, just maybe, they might get it.

Famous First and Last Lines

“For a long time, I went to bed early”

• Swann’s Way
• The author’s full name was Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871-1922). He was born in Paris and raised during the French Third Republic. Proust was raised with his father’s catholic beliefs.
• Published in 1913.
• In the beginning of the novel, the narrator talks about how sleep alters our surroundings. It then goes on to describe the narrator’s life as aristocracy and the middle classes change during the Third Republic.
• To be completely honest, I don’t think I would ever read this. I have trouble following along with historical books, and just reading the summary of this one I was completely lost.

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”

• Winnie-the-Pooh
• Alan Alexander Milne (1882 – 1956) was born in London and went to a school run by his father.  He joined the British Army during WWI, was an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later the Royal Corps of Signals. After being discharged in February of 1919, he settled in Mallord Street, Chelsea. He married in 1913.
• Published in 1926.
• First volume of a series. Follows the tale of a teddy bear, a pig, a donkey (all toys), an owl, and a rabbit (both living).
• I think I would read this. After watching Winnie the Pooh as a kid, I would be interested on going back and reading where a good portion of my childhood came from.

Playing with the Bears

For a long time, I went to bed early.

I thought that would help; that maybe if I wasn’t awake late at night or early in the morning, the thought wouldn’t come. They would leave me alone and let me suffer in peace.

How wrong I was. Even if I wasn’t awake to actively think, my brain still betrayed me by slipping them into my dreams. II would toss and turn, crying out to the point that my husband would have to wake me up. We would sit there, wrapped up in our blankets and each other, with me bawling my eyes out.

I was completely zombie-like. With the combined efforts of no sleep and guilt, I couldn’t function properly. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – eat, talk, or keep my attention on any one thing for more than ten minutes.

They tried to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, even though I knew it was. When we adopted our little boy, I wanted to be the best parent in the world. We would sit and talk, laughing about the made up stories I would tell him. Bears were his favorite thing on the planet, but he would always say that they came second to his father and I. He always asked about them, always curious and wanting to know everything about the four legged animals.

“Dad,” he would ask, “Can we go play with the bears?”

Of course I always told him no. They were dangerous, I sad. Not for little boys to mess around with.

Then, on the very first sunniest, nicest day of the year, my husband and I couldn’t find him. We looked all over, but he was nowhere to be found. Eventually we found the note, written in his cute little handwriting, that he was going to play with the bears.

Naturally we called the police. But even now, five years later, we still haven’t found him. I think of him out there, playing with his bear. And I want him home.

But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

Life of Quotes

“The Devil is real, and he isn’t a little red man with horns and a tail. He can be beautiful because he’s a fallen angel and he used to be God’s favorite”

                    - American Horror Story

 Everyone, Christian or not, has at least heard of the Devil. They paint him to be some horrible, bad, evil guy. I'm not saying he's not, because I think that he is. But it seems that people tend to forget where he came from. He did a 'bad' thing, sure (that did lead to much greater 'bad' things), but he had best intentions at heart. And I feel that this can correspond into everyday life.

There are always multiple sides to everything. Just because you might think they did wrong, they might believe they are in the right. In their own eyes, everything thinks they're always right, and we would do good to remember that.

“To die would be an awfully big adventure”

                    - Peter Pan

A few years ago, I never thought that my life would be as good as it is now. I was absolutely miserable, and honestly thought about ending my life. Now, years down the road, I know that that would have been a major mistake. Nothing is permanent, as cheesy as that is, and it will eventually get better. It might takes week, it might take years, but it will get better.

“The best of us can find happiness in misery”

                    - Patrick Stump (Fall Out Boy)

This goes along with the previous quote. There is almost always at least one good, happy thing mixed in with the horrible ones. Plus, I love this band.

I'm not too sure where I found this one. All I know is that I stumbled across it, and it's now one of my favorites. It's a self-help quote, because whenever I'm feeling down, I just take a glance at it, and it helps brighten a tiny part of my day.

Reading, Reading, Always Reading

Question #1: I can read anywhere. Over the years, I have perfected the ability to block out any and every thing, and just read for hours and hours at a time. I can be cold, hot, outside, or lying in bed, but if I can pick up a book and just sit there and read, it won’t matter where I am. I will just go off in my own little adventure land anyways.

And I actually hate eating while reading. I can focus on one or the other, but for some reason I cannot do both at the same time. Then if, God forbid, I get little food smudges on the pages, I will freak out. I can fold pages, spill water on them, write on them, but if any food touches my books, the world might as well be over.

 

Question #5: It seems that every time I pick up a book, I will read and read and read until it’s finished. I am very picky about what books that I do read, so when I go for it, I make sure to finish it. Usually right away.
Don’t get me wrong, there are stories that took absolutely ages to finish.  Take Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for example. I started that maybe five times, got almost a hundred pages in, and just could not go any further. Then there’s White Fang, by Jack London. In fifth grade, I wanted to read this so badly for some reason. But every single time I started, I only got possibly ten pages read. Eventually I actually sit down and forced myself to read it, got past the ‘boring introduction’ bit, and devoured it.




Question #8: I do not think I can narrow my favorite series to just one. All the ones I like, I like them for different reasons, and I just cannot compare one to another. If asked which I read more often, I could not answer that, either. I can go years without reading a certain series, glance at the titles, pick it up and scan over a page or two, and I am sucked right back in.




Question # 11: I do not like thinking that a person has to be a certain way in order to like a book. Unless there is a legitimate reason for not being able to read something, then go for it.
When I write, I do not stop to think if anyone will like my work or not. If I can find a way to express my thoughts into words, then I did my part. It is the readers’ job to decide if they want to read it or not.




Question #12: Reading definitely helps being able to write. It could help figure out how to express yourself, get your sentence structures, the stories’ mood, and all that fun jazz.
On the other hand, though, reading does not necessarily make a writer. Just because somebody reads dozens of books a month, does not mean they have what it takes to write. Writing is hard work, and not everyone feels that they have the ability to do it.

Why Birds Sing

Birds, they sing for open places.

For not having to hide.

For skies of blue

and clouds of white.

They sing for flight

for opening wings and moving away.

Hope of more is why they sing,

for options far and wide.

To live and laugh and love they sing,

with anyone by your side.

Birds, they sing for freedom,

to be your own person with your own kingdom.