Young Writers Society

Hi, guys. I've written this "expository essay" recently for my English class, and I went a little bit farther than the topic has asked, but I did kind of bring it home, didn't I? The pre-write is my structure and themes in my writing. Comments are always appreciated, thank you very much in advance.

Pre-write:

Three stages of life - childhood, maturity, old age

Two variables - open-mindedness (liberation) and dreaminess (perfection vs. reality) decline over many years

Art has always been immortal -> its cycle within a person

Coincidence and symbolism

Multiple perspectives

Topic:

Write an essay explaining whether you prefer a big city or small town in which to live and why you prefer it.

It would have been so funny if it weren't so sad already.

- Russian Proverb

Insomnia

Good question. I would want to live in a place where I could learn. For me, learning (different from education) is my understanding of the meaning of life, at least for right now. I guess if I could describe myself as a third person character from a novel or a short story, it would be an Occam's razor in terms of understanding. My character's life span would have been divided into three rational parts: childhood, maturity, and old age. There are certain stereotypes associated with each, and I pendant towards experiencing everything life brings so I can analyze and make light of what had happened.

Part I. Prestidigitation.

I would want to live my young springs in a communal apartment of a metropolis, where children scream like fishwives in the market, where cats give birth on the dotted linoleum of the hall, where neighbors thunder with plates in the kitchen shared between two or three families in four notepaper leaf-thin walls, and where the men of the house smoke uncontrollably with a glass of port in their hands. It's also the place where concierge never smiles. I think this gives me a lot of food for thought afterwards, because my life like this would be very lively. I would contemplate at night and think about my dreams and aspirations on a squeaky camp-bed with fresh bed sheets, waiting for something to happen. Sometimes I might even cry, swaying my face dry against a pillow, if I would happen to feel isolated and underprivileged. Or I might even blame my family for putting me into this misery, little would I know at the time, that it depends on me on how to get the best of every situation. When it would be time to write my memoirs, I would revisit my childhood, and think that I would love to repeat it. I would be imaginative, and I would live in my fantasies and dreams when they flourished during the night. I would escape just like this:

One night, I dreamt a dream,

In which I was a dreamer.

I had no destiny, I lived,

For everything I knew was but

A thin film on my eyelids.

I found my reflection

Because dreamers often lie,

In bed asleep, while they do dream

Things true.

(W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.57-58, 1597)

“Daddy? Tell me, where does sky meet water?” I questioned.

“Honey…,” he rolled his eyes, “I wouldn't know, maybe, they're both reflections of each other, when there is only one thing left.”

“What?” I needed some explaining.

“Just think of it as a skyline. A horizon. Our sky reflects water over a horizon, and vice versa,” my Dad has always been successful in mathematics and sciences, but otherwise, when explaining the things he had learned to a five-year-old.

I decided to check it out myself. When my family went to bed in the evening, around eight o'clock (sunset had already passed), I sneaked out from my cabin, gripping a three-colored kitten, Laima, to my chest. No, I wasn't scared at all, what do you think of me? I stepped over our wooden mosaic, made into a sturdy floor. It was beige with years. I heard a squeaky rattle on my left, and reluctant to face the noise, I began whispering to my kitten, “Don't worry, everything’ll be okay, I won't let you be eated by those whimpering monsters.” The kitten looked very helpless indeed. Light wind beseeched my ears into retreat, it was cold, and it felt like I was abandoned into nature from any civilization in the radius of a hundred kilometers. Our ship silently dissected the water, only the swooshing of waves gave me an idea that I was nearing our bottomless peril. Yes, it was our sea. We owned it. Our kingdom did.

“Look, Laima, you can see nothing but darkness!” The kitten's wide eyes and fidgeting nose made me think that it sensed water. I did too. It greeted us at home with a salty delivery and a fresh, crisp odor like when my Daddy would prepare bacon and pancakes every morning. The aroma would gently reel over to my cabin as an alarm clock, so-to-say, if we had one in our early century. Something drew a mural on water; all of my revelations were reflected on the gliding surface, as a formation of ice over an ocean echoed the images of fish and marine life in the sizzling luster of the morning. “I.. It looks very heavenly,” I stammered to notice a nature's art.

And that's how I would fall in love.

Part II. Lain.

Buddhists call it the Middle Path. It's a way between two extremities, a way which renders acceptance and peace. I would want to live my age of maturity in a place, where I would feel content and recognized for whatever I happened to become. An apartment in a big city would be a perfect home. This would be my days of Nick and Nora Charles. I would design my flat to reveal white window curtains with pink polka dots, velvet couches with cozy plaids, a mahogany piano in the hall, and another round of cheerful bibelots to my guests. I would find my city now more soothing than intriguing. I would have accepted the secrets and hardships that it dealt me in my youth, and I would perhaps forget my past so I could concentrate on my future. After all, my future would not contain solitude, and I would have to care for more than myself to make the decisions that would make the prospect of things. I guess my age of hubris would be over because they would not face the test of time. I reincarnated once again.

“Thou wast all that to me, love,

For which my soul did pine-

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine…”

(Edgar Poe, To One in Paradise, 1834)

I was driving alongside C-470, listening to some radio, looking carefully at where I was going, doing my old thing. I passed by a park, where young children skipped hop-scotch on a playground, where girls flew up and down on the swings with chains, and where boys played soccer on a dew-dropped grass. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? It's that time of the day in a city, where everything is like it's supposed to be. People in the bazaar just across the streetcar tracks honked to advertise their products, usually consisting of fruits and vegetables, because nobody would buy meat from a hawker - that's a borderline with suicide. Their dirty, rough hands casually weighted the produce on the scales, sometimes corrected to show more that what was actually less, and gave sweet persimmon to passers-by who would then be righteous to buy them. Beggars and deformed with a hat on the ground or a hand that plead showed-off their filth and squalor near a temple. Couples with ice creams walked in the light of a Sunday afternoon. Elderly men stretching in a swallow on their balconies over a highway. The usual gang.

I bypassed a green light, when suddenly a police car approached me, signaling me to stop. I was in favor of the law, and I have never done anything wrong to achieve such attention from the police, I thought. I pulled over to the curb, opened my window and looked curiously at the officer.

“Ma'am? Your left signal was off when you turned to… 37th Street,” he said, looking up to see the street name positioned at the intersection. “I need to see your driver's license, and your trunk. Open wide.” Bad joke.

“Oh yeah… I remember, that was a wild night, wilder than I thought,” I chuckled to provide blush to the officer's trembling cheeks. I would never miss a chance to scare or put shame on a newbie. “Here you go,” I showed him my license.

“Alright. Don't forget that it expires in… eight months,” he sighed. I guess he had to get used to counting and observing things before he could speak towards them. Maybe he became a police officer just to get rid of math in his life.

“And as for the trunk - voilà.” I arose to suffice his orders; went to the back of my '96 Ford, and inserted the key to unlock my trunk. To my amazement, when I was letting it ajar, I heard a noise, which I've never heard before in my trunk. Clapping. I raised my eyebrows to show my confusion as to what in the world would clap in my trunk. The last time I remember checking it was a few weeks ago, when I dragged a spare tire over the edge, in hopes I would run over some deer's shed antlers or at least, a sharp nail - in which situation, I would be prepared. “Always prepared and ready!” was an infamous motto of Soviet red pioneers.

Doves. Long-winged bland doves flooded our frozen faces, tripping the door of my trunk, circling and coiling in the wind. I was happy to see them go for some reason.

Part III. Back to earth.

Many years had passed, counted by how many tears were cried, by how many smiles were caught. With no more dreams left in me, I would enjoy the art created by others. I would live in a little village, a settlement that would be located near a metropolitan area, but still irrelevant to others. For example, a town of Repino, found adjacent to Saint-Petersburg. Home to a murky passage - a trail - which got lost into the woods, a raining sky, and seaweed-blemished golden sand, just across Finland. I would sit down on a wooden bench, hidden somewhere behind thick shrubbery, and listen to silence. A couple miles away, a museum of a famous Russian artist, Repin, would be stationed. I would visit Repin's house, exactly where he had lived his last days, and visit his beautiful garden. It would cover many acres, and it would have a little well, really, a wide bucket. It would be said that if someone would dip their hands or forehead in the water, experienced only by a Russian winter, they would instantaneously be cured of whatever happened to weak their health. Every guest Repin housed would have done that. On my part, I would walk in the summer and listen to the air passing rapidly over a spring beneath a rocky bridge. I would experience everything I hadn't yet in my life, and I would be truly existent for I would live in the moment. I would never care less for my past and for my search for identity.

Crimson coat in flight,

Red robin rubied in iced

Pantomime of art.

I didn't have any dreams that night. I went to sleep forever happy. I have made a mark on this world.

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan - November 16th, 1581 (1885)

Repin, oil on canvas