Undergraduate / "my mother nicknamed me Rosebud" - yale supplement [4]

There's this one bench in Central Park that I call my own. In the snow, its wrought-iron glimmers, with romantic brown metal from the 1920s. Located just outside of a small tunnel, the bench sits at the intersection of three paths. With a line of sight to the bridge above, the bench is like a watchguard, with views in all directions.

In the winter, when the snow falls I frequent this lonely locale. The timelessness of this junction makes me feel, each time, that I have left New York and traveled somewhere new. The bench seems to make friends with passerby's while I am gone.

But every winter, when the homework load dies down a bit, I take whatever I need to do, and go back to the bench. The bench knows my Arabic lessons, Italian songs, Chinese characters, and more recently, SAT words.

Bundled in my black pea coat, with a scarf around my neck, I feel timeless like the bench. Wind whisks my hair into a dance, one synchronized with the rest of the women walking down the street. The lights of the city, the bustling cars, the prattle of tourists fade behind me as I pass through the gates of the park. In the park, I can notice each person who passes. Their walks: some veer left, some sway to and fro, and some seem to dance to an internal beat.

I take my seat on the bench, ready for the ideal journey: learning while I see everything happening around me. Snow falls. People pass. And time nips at the nape of my neck or tickles unbearably at the tips of my toes. Time and cold band together, making my stay short, giving me time to learn twenty words, at most. (stick with I)

It's not as if I did not know this would happen. I saw time passing, in people's walks, in ticking clocks. But I hoped, that maybe this time, the sun would stay just a bit longer.

Year after year, this hope makes me go.

At birth, my mother nicknamed me Rosebud, for my great grandmother Alda Rose. Though she has never seen the film Citizen Kane, I think my nickname is fate. During times like my visits to the bench, those simple things give me life. Those simple things give me hope, expel my fears, and bring me to that timeless realm of human existence, That junction between the paths of so many, where I know that even when I'm not there someone will pass by, and keep the bench warm for the next time I visit.