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.
