Rooted

An ode to friendship and one friend in particular. Thank you, Hannah, for holding me up when I was sure I would fall. Love you to the moon and back.

Rooted

Her hair is soft and silken and thin, like a child's.
She has green eyes that have storms in them, and I can tell when one is coming.
She laughs easily and infectiously and  often
Her handwriting makes me feel nostalgic.

In photos, she often doesn't smile,
Afraid you'll see her braces, like a dirty secret.
It makes her look serious, intense, ethereal.

When she was a little girl,
she washed her snoopy doll until he was waterlogged and limp.
She loved him ragged.

She has never liked Christmas
But hung the first ornament on my tree,
Because she was trying.

Sometimes, when I am tired and worn thin with living,
I will lay my head in her lap,
And she'll stroke my hair,
Slow and steady strokes.

She only owns one pair of jeans,
But two pairs of harem pants.
She doesn't wear much makeup,
And her eyeshadow is cracked and dry,
Wistful and forgotten.

I have seen her angry and I have seen her frightened,
But neither one very often.
Once, she made us all hang bits of paper on a tree in the school quad,
wishes written on them with pens she passed around the lunch table.

She wanted them to hang there, as reminders,
And she wanted them to grow.
That was months ago,
But the wish tree is still there,
Surviving the weather,
Humbly holding our dreams,
Rooting us to a bright and shining future.

My Heart Sits

I have been ill, so that's why the post is late this week--but this is an older poem I wanted to share. Let me know what y'all think! 

My Heart Sits

I am going to tell you a secret, that really isn’t a secret at all.

Are you listening?

Alright.

The truth is, my heart likes to wander, and

sometimes she  sits, tucked away.

If you look hard, you can see her.

My heart sits on the windowsill, wishing she could fly

My heart sits in the ocean, rolling in the waves.

My heart sits in the pages of a book, riding on the words, lost and found again.

My heart sits in the Redwood trees, listening to their whispers.

My heart sits in the steam from a cup of tea, a showerhead, where she is thick and close.

My heart sits in the sunlight, telling me to dance.

My heart sits in the alchemy of learning, the realization, the firework.

My heart sits in the heavy green hills, wrapping herself around the valleys, the lagoons, the ancient knowledge that they guard.

My heart sits in laughter, jumping  off of each  expectant syllable.

My heart sits in  long glances, suspended on the bridge between two pairs of eyes.

My heart sits in old photographs, reminding me.

 My heart sits in sweet, pungent strawberries, bursting on my tongue.

My heart sits the candles, burning in their flame.  

She sits in the California night, in the silken shimmer of a party dress; she sits in old pajamas, in favorite movie popcorn bowls.

She sits in the flowers on the countertop, the smells of meals soon ready.

  She sits in the innocent labors of a bright-eyed child,

 And she sits in the nostalgia and the dreams of the girl that child became.

My heart likes to wander, but she also likes to come home.

My heart sits in this poem. 

Waiting for a Future

Hello Everyone,
With application season behind us and the waiting and hearing well on its way, I decided I would post a part of my college essay in celebration. Hoping all of you are enjoying your 2014 and have bright things ahead of you this year! A sampling of my Common App essay is below :)

Have you ever felt words pulse through your veins, alongside your blood?  I have.  Every day.  Swirling through my arteries, pumping through my long limbs.  I am made of them.  I am a child of prose.  And so are the people I love most in the world.

Children are microcosms of their cultures.  Mine was one in which rhetoric was king.  My father, a lawyer, loves to play with words.  He uses words like “penultimate” in daily conversation; this was the white noise that I was raised on.  My mother, a fiction writer, also instilled an early passion for language.  One of the earliest boundaries I learned as a child was to leave my mother be in the stolen hours she managed to find to work on her chapter.

Both of my parents relish other people’s stories too, not just their own—we are a family of story tellers and readers. Raised in this framework, writing became as natural to me as walking.  It was instinct, like a newborn infant grabbing its’ mother’s finger.  Before I even learned the alphabet, I constantly told the stories that were running through my head.  The family lore holds that I told my first story just past my second birthday.  It concerned a wolf and a duck; the latter was eaten.  This was the extent of his saga, but it was the beginning of mine.  I stumbled over words too big for me, because they weren’t my words: they were an inherited treasure trove, my parents’ most lasting gift.  Words are the lens through which I have always understood the world.

Even so, it was not until I attended the California Summer School for the Arts as a Creative Writing student that I learned how deeply tied I am to the written word.  It was a big step: a month on the campus of CalArts in Valencia, studying writing all day, every day. My roommates and I called our dorm room Writeous, a not-so-clever pun of which we were very proud.  I have never excelled at sports, and teen pop culture sometimes seems foreign to me.  I love theater, but the people drawn to it often make me feel overly cerebral, unfashionably introspective.  But with the writing students, I didn’t have to explain myself anymore.  I recognized the  irony of  people who love words more than anything else in the world but do not need them to express their feelings to one another.  I was home.  

I found my place in the classrooms of CalArts, in the ninety degree heat of July as I created prose that was richer than  I ever  thought possible.  I discovered who I am there.  I am a child of prose, and I am proud of the inkstains on my skin.

The Pink Armchair

 In my bedroom, there is an overstuffed pink armchair, fat and comfortable, hearty, 

Where I like to read. 

 Wrapped in a throw blanket, a paperback in my hands, I am content there. 

In my pink armchair, I can hear the front door open and close, the exclaims of hellos, 

The dogs' toes click-clacking on the hardwood. 

And in my pink armchair, in my room in the back of the house, 

Reading a novel, 

I can hear all that, and I know the world is waiting for me, 

But I stay. I stay right where I am, in a field hospital in France, 1917. 

In Jamaica, in a rambling pink villa, 1908. 

In the crook of a tree in  Samuel P. Taylor park, 1986. 

On a busy London street, 1925. 

I hear the door open and close, I hear the noises of a house on West Baltimore Avenue, Larkspur,  2013, but I don't want to leave my pink armchair and all the places it and a book can take me. 

There is a beautiful rich life that is calling me, calling me from the pink armchair, 

from the novels,the whispering pages, 

But that world is painful sometimes and frightening, and most of all uncertain. 

And my heart quickens and tightens at the thought of its gifts and its betrayals, 

its sensual offers and cold rejections. 

In a book, 

I am allowed the opportunity to go into someone's life, their private thoughts, their lowest moments, 

Without having to ask. 

I am a fly on the wall of their beautiful rich life, 

And I see and feel their triumphs and their falls. 

I want to stay with them, stay with them all. 

All the characters that taught me without ever knowing me how to love and hate and explore, 

Who showed me how to be proud and intelligent and joyful,

Who gave me the chance to  visit their existences. 

But there is a sadness in that, 

Because I must live too, 

For the pink armchair  is only good for so long. 

Someone has come to visit. 

I hear them say that they were in the neighborhood and thought they'd stop in after a hike, 

I hear my father tell them to come on in. 

I see them round the bend from the foyer, 

I see them from my open door, my pink armchair, 

And I see them see me, 

Wave hello. 

I wave back. 

I put down my book, 

pull the blanket off my knees. 

Straighten my hair. 

Enter West Baltimore Avenue, 2013, 

Into the beautiful, rich, wild, frightening, uncertain world.