An Essay For Your Thoughts
I didn’t have access to a pen and paper. No ink blots were to be left as stains on my hands and parchment. There were no sticky notes around, no computers or phones to type with, and no notepads to doodle in. It was then that I knew that I wouldn’t be able to think.
At times, the only way I can dissect and delineate my thoughts is to write them down. I’ll have vague ideas in my head, stories sitting on the edge of my tongue, but no way of describing what’s bouncing around inside my head through word of mouth. (more…)
It Was Enough
I received a missed phone call while I was out in the garden. I try not to take my phone outside with me for fear of a cascading pile of rich dirt that would inevitably fall on top of the expensive device. And with drops of cool liquid from the watering canister sneakily trying to fall on to the dark dirt in a mission to make mud, I figured that I should keep my phone inside. The call was from a dear friend who had followed the missed call with a text message. It was the habit of my generation, in this day and age, to leave an intended message in the form of a text rather than one’s voice.
I picked up the smartphone and clicked the button on the side which would illuminate the screen and read the message, Hey, how is everything? (more…)
The Breath of Summer
I took a breath as I stepped out into the light. A familiar scent of dust covered asphalt gently baking like a sheet of homemade cookies in an oven brushed by me as I began to exhale. The subtle scent would sit on the tip of my nostrils as I walked to my car that was strategically parked under the eve of a nearby building’s roof. I felt a heaviness in the air as I sifted through the barely noticeable light summer breeze. It was undoubtedly warm outside, and the thermometer I saw, after I finally climbed into my car and turned on the engine, indicated that it was steadily growing warmer. (more…)
Timelessness
I had a read a text riddled with anxiety and worry. The words pushed for a more detailed answer and begged for better news. “We have plenty of time,” I texted my best friend, “the wedding is months away.”
My friend quickly typed back as if to shake me back into reality from a distance. “Yeah, but it’s already May.”
May? What had happened to the rest of the year? One moment I was thinking about the end of February, and within the next blink of an eye it was the end of May. I had so many other things that I had planned to do by the end of the year, and the world was already spinning into the second half of the calendar. (more…)
The Digital Footprint You Leave Behind
When I was a child, I became obsessed with the idea of leaving behind a piece of my life after my death. I thought seriously about time capsules, taking ample amounts of photographs, and recording the major events of life while I was alive from my own perspective.
Too many trips to the library and a newfound love of pushing my nose into the insides of the “Dear America” books had made me believe that I could be like one of the lead fictional characters of those books who detailed incredible events that occurred throughout the course of history from their own viewpoint. And it was at the age of eleven that I had begun writing in a diary.
One of the first events that I recorded in my diary after receiving the blank wide-ruled diary with an obnoxiously bright blue fuzzy cover came just after the two World Trade Center Towers were struck by planes in a terrorist attack. I felt, in that moment of jotting down my thoughts and feels on 9/11, that my decision to keep a diary like the fictional children in the book series that I had come to love was the right choice. How else was I going to look back on the important times in my life?
Then came the birth of social networking and blogging. (more…)
