"Three Minutes" (Life Sketch)

Three minutes. One-hundred and eighty seconds. One-twentieth of an hour.

            Three minutes. That’s all you have—to deliver a decisive blow, to bring your opponent to their knees, to make them beg for mercy, to declare ultimate victory. Three minutes.

            He glares into my eyes, searching my soul for one thing, and one thing only. He is searching for the demons to clench at my heart, shadow my eyes, and shake my body into tremors. He is searching for fear. From the darkness in his eyes, and the smirk upon his face, I know what he wants. He wants to prove that I am weaker, that I am afraid, that I am inadequate to him. Beyond it all, he wants blood to be splattered upon the floor of the arena. My blood.

            In this arena, there are no amicable feelings between us; those feelings died long ago the moment he placed a knife in my back. He is a wolf in sheep’s skin. Those eyes tell me so.

            The time is set on the clock, and we begin. Three minutes. That is how long we will fight. We will fight one another until the time is up, unless one of us is rendered unable to move first. Today, he plans for that to be me. How do I know? It is because his girlfriend told him so. She told him to make me cry, to make me hurt, because maybe then, her insecurities would go away.

            She is on the sidelines, shouting at him to destroy the fat, ugly girl. Then, she laughs. I can hear that laugh echo in my mind, as my eyes never break concentration on him. I feel heat creeping up my neck, burning away at my cheeks. They call me names at school, and I ignore them. Now should be no different, I tell myself. Now is the time to do what I cannot do at school.

            He lunges towards me, aiming at my face. My hands quickly go up to block, and then in a split-second, I feel his foot plummeting into my ribs. Instinct takes over, and my knee makes contact with his chest, my fist soon to follow. His breath escapes upon the back of my neck as I withdraw to fire a kick at his head. He quickly dodges, the side of his head missing my foot by a near inch. The monster then emerges. Throttling himself at me, he begins thrashing away at my face and body with his firsts and merciless kicks. In the midst of his attack, one clear kick nails me in my temple, clouding the vision in my right eye. The smirk returns to his face; he believes he is about to win because I have always been submissive, weak, unaggressive.

            However, he has severely misjudged me.

Today, I have something to fight for, something I am not willing to lose.

            As he attempts to fire another kick deep into my jaw, I block and catch his foot, causing him to stumble. The smirk instantly disappears as my foot meets his cheekbone, no longer holding back. We begin to throw blows at one another simultaneously. The room has grown utterly silent, but I barely notice for all I hear is his panting, his gasps for breath, my heartbeat.

            We are lost in motion, in chaos. My fists collide with flesh and bone, my feet dance upon the ground, readily flying at his head. He attempts to do the same, but I feel his knees going weak. The glare from his eyes has returned, as he squints from the sweat pouring down the sides of his face. Staring straight back at him, I am only reminded of what he has done to me, the offenses and crimes he has committed against me, how he has looked down upon me. Today he had hoped to destroy me, to prove to all who were watching that I am nothing.

            Time is up. Our instructors are pulling us apart, offering support to our battered bodies. The instructors stare at me silently for a long moment, and then nod. That was enough for me.

            As I walk past my fellow peers, they are quiet, but nod at me as well. Someone gives my shoulder a firm squeeze, another pats my back. From this day forward, things would change.

Bruises and cuts will eventually fade, but memories of this fight will not. They are scarred upon his memory, as they are engraved in mine. For him, he wanted blood, but the blood on the arena floor that day was not mine; he will always know that. For me, I just wanted respect. 

Three minutes. One-hundred and eighty seconds. One-twentieth of an hour. Three minutes.

"Tick Tock Tick" (Life Sketch)

April 22, 2011. 11:31 P.M.

I asked a question, a question somewhere deep inside of me, I knew the answer to, but was too afraid to accept. It was a question I asked two weeks prior, and been told to wait for an answer. On this night, he told me we could meet the following day, grab a meal, and discuss it. But, this was no business deal. It was a matter of the heart. From his reply, I knew my heart was going to break. How was I sure? It was because I asked for honesty—the truth, thus so received.

April 22, 2011. 11:59 P.M.

            My hand trembled as I held my phone, reading his answer. Slowly, I scrolled through his text messages, reading each line, fully absorbing the words, the confession, the truth. A weight sunk upon my chest, and my hands grew cold and clammy. For a brief moment, life was sucked out of me, and I was a fish upon land. There never seems to be a pleasant truth; those mysterious wise folk who always said, “Ignorance is bliss”, was indeed correct.

Yet, even in the pain, I could not find regret for asking for the truth. I only regretted that I had not asked sooner, because on this night, I discovered that what I thought was real was not. I learned I had spent the last three months blinded by the boy who admitted, he was leading me on. He confessed that he realized what he was doing, yet he had continued, and now what is left is the truth in front of me. I buried my face into my hands. Faintly in the background, there was the constant tick, tock, tick. Time kept going; it never stopped. In a minute, it would be a new day.   

April 23, 2011.

A new day did come, and I worked on two term papers. It was all I could do, for now.

April 24, 2011. 10:40 A.M.

            This day was a beautiful Easter morning. My love for God urged me to attend church. However, the boy who revealed the truth that shook my reality less than 36 hours ago also attended the same church as I. We normally walked there together; today would be no different. I put on my best Easter outfit, and let my focus be on God. For that moment, I smiled, honestly.

            Once we entered the sanctuary, my smile faded as I saw her, sitting in the pews. I bit my bottom lip as I followed the boy towards the seats, towards the seats next to her. They chatted, they smiled, they laughed. She was on his left, I was on his right, but I could only wish that I were invisible, so at least there would have been an excuse for why he ignored me in front of her.

            After service, people stopped and gathered. He introduced her to everyone around, and then to me. I smiled and said hello, but I already knew who she was; she was his ex-girlfriend, and as he had revealed, I was only the rebound after her. From her forced smile and nervous shifting, she knew who I was too. Thus, I bid farewell and walked back to campus, alone, trying to remove the salt he had rubbed into the wound. It was the longest walk I had ever taken.

April 24, 2011. 3:10 P.M.

There was a knock on my door. I opened it, and he was there. He came in, and began asking if he could buy me food. I stared at him in disbelief. He kept asking, pushing. Of all people, why would I want him to buy me food, I thought. Then, he admitted he heard I had not been eating in the last day. My disbelief only grew; first, that was not true, and secondly, he had no right to be doing this. Frankly, I had lost some of my appetite from disgust at the situation, at the jerk, and at myself for being so stupid, so blind to have fallen into the trap.

Then, in the midst of my thoughts, I heard him speak again, telling me that he hoped I wouldn’t do something I would regret, because he wanted me to know, he wasn’t worth it. Wait, I thought, is he telling me to not kill myself over him? Oh my goodness, he is! He then continued to tell me that he wanted to check my mental stability, as finals were coming up, and he didn’t want me to throw it all away for him. This form of arrogance was appalling, shocking, perhaps one of the greatest insults I had ever received in my life. Normally, I would have just nodded, stayed silent, and kept my thoughts to myself. However, today was different.

I stared at him, straight in the eyes as I said, “Don’t worry, I know you’re not worth it.” In that moment, I realized what self-respect was; and, because of that, I would never be the same.

"The Secret" (Life Sketch)

She held a secret; one buried deep beneath the surface, hidden away from the world. It was a secret she would never dare tell; never give voice to, for if she did, she was afraid that all her fears, her agony, would come to life at the verbal utterance of the secret that gnawed away at her soul from morning to night. Thus, she told no one, because perhaps, she had no one to tell. However, if one stopped to look at her, not just at her, but somewhere far away in her eyes, you could see it. You could see her secret, begging to be forgotten.

At school, no matter where she went, she could not escape her tormentors. They were always there, always present. Their guns were loaded and aimed; their artillery supply was endless, filled with crafted rumors, new lies to be told, and cutting remarks with more bite than a rabid dog, ready to be spewed out in an instant. Every moment of every day, she wished she were not their target; yet, she did not wish that sort of pain upon anyone else. It appeared that meanness now meant power, and kindness was to be scoffed at, forgotten. But what could she do when kindness had always been her strength? She was lost, and her secret grew within her.

People blamed her. People told her it was her fault; they told her she must deserve it. Some people told her it was not a big deal, that she should simply ignore it. She would stare at them, screaming in her mind how could she ignore the lies, the rumors, the degrading and disgusting speech thrown at her, in person, through the whisper of the grapevine, and online? Few inquired for the truth behind the lies, and no one dared to defend her; no one wished to become the next target. While others said nothing and turned away in shame, others told her to disappear, to hide her fat and ugly self somewhere else. All the while, teachers closed their eyes.

At night, while her secret festered in her soul, she would ask God why was she alive? She would ask Him if He even loved her, because if He did, why did she hurt so much? When the tears came, for every night they would, she would beg Him to make it better, to make the bad people stop, to make them go away. However, after endless months of pleading, she began to run out of tears, and the pain only grew. For once in her life, she did not know where God was.

After many months, her secret wanted to be free. The secret she held quietly in the depths of her heart began to rip away at her control. Bruises began. Deep scratches began to impale her arms. Her inner cheeks were swollen and raw from her clenching, from her attempts to stifle her cries, to stop her tears from falling in front of her tormentors, until she was completely numb.

She began to imagine life in a different way, a way that knew no pain— a life where she was happy, free from hurt, free from the monsters seeping venom into every crevice of her life.

That is when she began to give in to her secret. She would start fiddling with the scissors; sighing as she blankly stared at the kitchen knives. In her room, she would mindlessly gaze at the ceiling fan, watching it spin, round and round. As she opened her college acceptance letters, her hand would pause a little too long upon the golden letter opener and her mother would stop cutting the vegetables for dinner, and stare. Perhaps, her mother began to know her secret too.

One day, while she was home alone, she stood in her bathroom, gripping the rim of the sink. Her tears would not come; her hands were cold. It was time. Releasing her death grip on the sink’s rim, her hand reached for the medicine cabinet, but stopped in midair as she dared to capture a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She stared at this person in the mirror, someone she barely knew. As she gazed into the mirror, however, she remembered. Her mother’s laugh, her mother’s tears, her mother’s smile. Her hand lowered as she thought of her mother.

Without any lingering doubt, she left the bathroom and sank into the carpet of her room. As her cheek brushed against the softness, a tear trickled down her face. As long as she could still cry, she knew she would survive, somehow, someway, she would. She would find a way. She let go of her secret because she could finally remember. She remembered why she was alive.        

"The House on Mango Street" Reflection

“She thinks stories are about beauty. Beauty that is there to be admired by anyone, like a herd of clouds grazing overhead. She thinks people who are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don’t have much time and are often tired. She has in mind a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or comes after..."  –Introduction

            This is how the author, Sandra Cisneros, designed The House on Mango Street. To some , it may seem choppy, simply a book containing random short stories and poems, lacking a sense of overall cohesiveness. However, although this style for the book is not one that I would normally prefer, I can only find respect for Cisneros’ vision and the beauty that she presented in each special story pertaining to the coming-of-age of Esperanza. The first person perspective that she utilized through the character of Esperanza provided the reader to feel like they were in her head—hearing her thoughts, seeing through her eyes, feeling her emotions, all on an intimate level that is sometimes rarely visible in other novels. The choppiness and sometimes lack of connection between stories were at first confusing; however, it helped to match the train of thought of a young girl—not all issues will “stick”; a new day is a new day.

            I must admit, though, this book did not enchant me during the first read. When I read the book for the first time, I barely found any enjoyment. Perhaps it was because I was extremely sick, but I felt disengaged from the novel in the same fashion that the stories seem disengaged from one another. Then, after my fever broke and I began to maintain a normal sense of consciousness again, I attempted to read The House on Mango Street once more. Somewhere in my discombobulated mind, I knew I had missed something important during the first read through that the author would have been utterly disappointed if she had known I had missed it.

            Hence, round two began in my attempts to read this novel! However, for this time, I approached the novel differently; rather than viewing the style as disorganized and scattered, I viewed it as purposeful to the depth and meaning of the novel. An author, I reminded myself, especially this author as seen in the introduction, does not write to confuse readers or disengage their attention, but rather provide a story that something meaningful is obtainable at any given time, no matter what point you enter the story. With this new mindset, I found myself unable to put the book down as I slowly watched the deterioration of Esperanza’s innocence, as well as her new discoveries and experiences leading to her darker perception of reality. To some extent, it was heartbreaking to see her confusion, her hurt, her sadness. At times, especially in the sections of “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark”, “Sally”, “Bums in the Attic”, “The Monkey Garden”, and “Red Clowns”, I wished I did not feel so connected with the character. I wished that the intimate connection established between reader and character were not there, because her pain became real, and her screams and thoughts would echo in my mind, hauntingly.

            “Sally, you lied. It wasn’t what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn’t want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it’s supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me?” –from “Red Clowns”

            Even now, I hate that section of the book, not because it was poorly written—quite the opposite, actually. It is so well written that I cannot shake the crawling feeling from my skin, the feeling of discomfort, disgust, whenever I read it.

            Overall, The House on Mango Street was an interesting reading experience for me. The first time was a blur, mudded with a fever and constant sneezing, so it should not really count. The second time, however, made such an impression that I cannot discount the talent and craft of Cisneros in creating a “book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense…”        

"To Kill a Mockingbird" Reflection

It has been about seven years since the first time I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird; I was only twelve years old when I first read the novel about a young girl and boy, their mysterious guardian angel, and the trials, tribulations, and social injustices faced within a Southern community in the 1930s. Even though much time has passed since my first reading of this novel, I must admit that my heart for it has not changed; the novel remains as one of my favorites. Although I cannot accurately recall how many times I have read this novel in the past seven years, I must say that each new reading encounter for me has always been like the first time—new, exciting, intriguing, moving. Perhaps that is the magic of the novel; it manages to capture my attention and pull at my heartstrings, each and every time.

However, now at the age of nineteen, the novel has a deeper meaning for me. When I was twelve, and even throughout my middle and high school career, I never fully grasped the impact of Boo’s character, until now. After some introspection, I think that my new understanding stems from my own experiences in college— being placed in a completely new environment, feeling isolated at times, being discriminated against for characteristics that I could not change. Because of these factors, I could recognize the multitude and impact of Boo’s character and his thoughts and feelings throughout the novel. As a young teenager, – who lived on a rock for her entire life - discrimination and isolation were understood, but not internalized. However, after experiencing those things first-hand, the depth of Boo’s character and the reasons for why he behaved the way he did no longer seems foreign to me, but rather; it is so understandable, it hurts. I think Harper Lee wished for readers to see the human in Boo; the compassion, the heart in the infamous character no one truly knew. I realized I no longer had my view of Boo that I did when I was twelve; now, I saw a part of myself in him.

Hence, I must admit that it was an interesting experience for me to relook at one of my favorite novels with new lenses of age and maturity. I realized that my rose-tinted glasses were broken long ago, leaving me to now recognize the gravity of the issues presented in the novel, and the progressive development of characters so much like myself; when I was twelve, perhaps I was too ignorant to see the similarities, to see that I was no different from them.

Yet, even though time has passed, – I have aged almost a decade since my first approach to this novel – my favorite quotes and chapters are unchanging. The final chapter, Chapter 31, was my favorite chapter before, now, and for always. I find this chapter to reflect upon the entirety of the novel; it still sends a chill through my soul, especially when I read the following:     

 “It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy...fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard…enacting a strange little drama….

…Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate…

Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

After 300-some pages, the reader finally captures a glimpse of Boo’s perspective—we can recognize that he viewed Scout and Jem as his children, children to love, children to protect. The simple enlightenment, the whirlwind recollection of three years that Scout has on that porch still makes me smile, still grips my heart, unmercifully.

Lastly, I cannot help but end my reflection of To Kill a Mockingbird with a quote that has mesmerized me throughout the years—a quote that has been with me from my first reading, and will be with me to my last:

“’An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice….’

‘…Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.’”