I Need to Start

writing again

you're all i fucking think about
get out of my mind, god damnit.

TIRED TRIED

Personal Essay (Common App)

Emma Cherry

Personal Essay 

Applying for Fall 2011  

Two oceans, two seas, one soul. I was created with the movement of the sea. Jamaica, 1988. My father fell to the grace of one knee before my mother. He held out his hand, and revealed the emerald ring which she would wear until the day she died. This was the beginning of everything. She wore an ivory wedding gown, a pasty tone of silk and lace lay upon her skin. Her bridesmaids smiled in their dresses; a velvet hunter green, an accent to my mothers  hazel eyes. There he stood, hands sifting through his thick hair, rich with the shade of soil.  As if everything else had combined into a coherent whole and was lost beneath the hard wood floor of the New York church, my mom and dad fell into the biggest moment they had ever felt. These sixty seconds which started with the slip of a golden ring on each finger, and ended with a mutual kiss from each of their lips and had expanded into five years to themselves. 

My mother grew up on the shores of the Hudson River. The warm apartment she called home, we still visit today. As a child she became familiar with the rough seas of Maine, every summer between the ages of three and eighteen her feet traveled the rocky beaches searching for sea glass and broken pottery. As a college student she traveled to Spain, spending Saturday nights embracing the brisk smell of the Mediterranean Sea. I know I will smell those waters one day. Mom and I are connected as you’ll understand further into this essay. 

Dad was different, sequestered, but not in a bad way. He grew up in a small town immersed in the quiet throws of Cincinnati, Ohio. He didn’t travel much, but he was my mothers everything. No ocean would ever match up to his love for her.  After they married, most of their time was spent on Block Island. They rented the same cottage every summer, spent their days on the beaches. Next, to Scotland they went. Sharing kisses on back roads over looking the North Channel. I was born shortly after, opened my eyes to the streets of Maplewood, New Jersey in 1993. Just as my mother did, as I child I grew familiar with the rocky beaches of Maine. I looked for sea glass and pottery just the way she did. Dad would be reading in the hammock just above the hill, moms hand in mine guiding me over the sharper of rocks. I loved the water. To play in it, to be beneath where everything was quiet and still, I loved to steer the sail boat with Dad. Three years later my sister Isabel was born, and two years after that my brother Jack. We were a family of five, but not for long.

September 11, 2001, a normal morning. Dad off to work and Mom embracing another morning with three young children. Off to school, make sure you have your lunch, soccer practice this afternoon? I was seven, third grade. Isabel, five and Jack, three. My dad died that day. He worked in the second tower of the World Trade Center, we became a family of four. I wanted the ocean. I wanted to fall beneath it’s glassy surface and feel every vibration of it’s stirs. 

We’ve grown up since then, my family and I. Mom misses the water, and so do I. When I was twelve my family and I moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Lake Erie isn’t much of an ocean, or anything I’d like to swim in, but it’s still nice to look at. The move was anything but easy. I entered middle school and was tortured. I remember this one boy would follow me in the halls as we walked between classes. He’d stretch his arms out, as if he was acting as an airplane. His voice forming the words ‘daddy, daddy’, over and over again. With his arms stretched wide, flying his airplane. I never thought someone could hurt me so badly. I began to self harm, I developed an eating disorder. I was far from who I ever wanted to be. After leaving the Chagrin Falls School district I found myself at Andrews Osborne Academy, in Willoughby, Ohio. I got into drugs and alcohol and was in and out of rehabs for three out of four years of my high school career. Here and there I’ve visited different shores of familiar places, but I haven’t been back to Maine. I miss it, Mom and I talk about it often. She’s become my best friend. I’ve learned honesty is key when searching for the calmest way of living life. I’ve developed a severe anxiety   disorder, which has kept me from living the way I believe in; calmly, at peace. I’ve been sober from drugs and alcohol for about a year. I live one day at a time, and when things are hard, I breathe. To notice the rise and fall of my chest, to feel my pulse lessen it’s rate, to wash the ocean of my mind with a different wave, that is how I live. I’m seventeen now,  Isabel fourteen, Jack twelve. Dad’s been gone for almost ten years, and we’re closer than any family. I’m not like many seventeen year olds,  I grew up at the age of seven, I grew up with the ocean. 

I'm Sorry My Heart Picked You

"You keep fucking fighting, stop fighting for me."

Lamp Shade City

Can't wake up with coffee, but with the people you rise 

Inside the city, tented by a lamp shade 

Keeping its members alive and warm and well kept, because anything less than a strict mothers approval in her kitchen isn't okay

Can't sleep with solace, but with the sinners you dream 

Along your eye lids hills have been drawn

This village is the bulb, it's incandescent drips of morning have a submissive tone 

Can't walk with unmarked hands, but with the pious you fight

---

Please don't talk to me, I fall in love way to easily
I'll find myself completely over analyzing the 30 seconds you took to look at me,
And I may very likely fool myself into thinking you waved me over
This is the part where I'd walk over to you after catching your eye at the coffee shop
And I'd ask if you like cream and sugar
And you'd try not to stare at my bitten fingernails
I'd possibly ask you for drinks and lure you in with my ability to be the most awkward co-worker
And like a heavy stone I'd lay,
And settle myself into the ground for months because you never called
And someone else would stumble u[on me and try to strike up a conversation
And this would be the part where all I muster up is,
"Please don't talk to me, I fall in love way to easily"

Home

You have authority over this house 

The uneven wooden boards beneath our bed belongs to you

Every coat hook and coffee stained counter top is yours forever

I am a guest in this shoppe

Laughs and glasses of gin for sale 

Your heart's half price 

I've walked in to this shoppe, this house of yours 

We got drunk on your kitchen floor and we held each other close through the waves of night time 

I know this house is yours 

Everything inside belongs to you 

I call it my home 

Tangier

We live in the city of Tangier, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic
Where we sit out on our work breaks and stare at the thrashing winds when they greet each other in the night
I came here with you to find the comfort of a home
A refuge
I work as a hotel manager
Where business men and their mistresses come to have important dinners
None of them wearing our clothes, but dressed in America
You work at the train station, lonely
Clicking tickets into seats while thinking about me
People write books about people like us, you know
They make examples of us
Everyone here was once alone
They came just as we did
This city is full of colors and people come to see them
Writers and artists and they try to imitate our lifestyles, to become us for the weekend so they can "feel"
I know you feel me
I'll see you tonight, my sweet love
We can sit out and watch the oceans meet

Taxi Loungers

We are the only birds that don't sing upon your arrival
We know you'll leave again
Just as the taxis do
To take their tired back seat lovers home
They call them the taxi loungers
Sometimes three or more at a time
They always leave eventually
You follow them to their homes
And we don't sing for you to come back

My Ocean

I can see this heart sized canal behind the cove
The sun is the energy in our hearts
And there is dark and light in all of us,
Because when we grind our teether, screaming for a muzzle while we sleep,
We end up writing more than speaking
And the waves of perception create a decision we have to make
To raise our left hands or our right
Because either way, each hands is experiencing the vibration of its state

If every possibility existed, I swear I'd be a better man
And I'd just want you, my ocean
I'd just need you, because the frequency of the East hasn't given you the answer you want
Even though it's night time
Your heart is light