Undergraduate /
"Shouldn't I type this instead?" - On handwriting - Commonapp essay [18]
I've worked on it a little, and, well, make it a bit longer. I'm not trying to torture my reader, but this is how "the flow" took me.
The conclusion and the introduction was changed. Please tell me if they are better or worse. I 've also added a few lines in the middle to smooth the flow of the story.
I realize I'm in dire strait right now. And thank you for helping me. I love your criticism. I 'm simply clueless about how to trim it. Everytime I look at it it just seems sorta lacking, and I keep adding more stuff. The essay is verging on obesity, really.
The page lies before her, innocent and full of suspense, like a sleeping beauty, hovering at the beginning, where all possibilities bloom, yet nothing materializes. She would have loved to submit it as it is and thus, remain a myth, an inscrutable face open to all divination, a secret chamber behind the closed door. To wrong the perfect blankness with her hideous handwriting, to smear the impeccable innocence with dark blots of complications is a sin, indeed, but one she has already committed by starting to write. She begins to unravel, despite the humiliation of being scrutinized, the glaring spotlight of judgment, for writing is her only means to connect to others. Her trembling thoughts refuse to be cleansed and clothed by MS Words, in tidy and standardized attires, insisting to be presented with their master. She quietly assents. This will be a naked exhibition. Over her handwriting she has no control.
Unconsciously, in her handwriting she interweaves other particles of her life, startled by the way they overlap one another. Stories envelope stories; universe unfolds within universe. She remembers the teacher at the calligraphy school, his iron hand clasping around hers, determined to dictate where the letters stand on paper. Yet all he could manage was to atomize the amorphous mass of strokes and curves into identifiable alphabet characters. Aesthetics was simply beyond reach, and he resigned, just like her mother did, after trying in vain to instill in her daughter feminine graces. There she lies, obdurately, with her handwriting, as a tattoo engraved by God, untouched by the grasp of will, unable to remove. She is nasty by nature.
Without proper tending the strokes run wild, like an ivy tree in the long-deserted garden, a cacophonous Stravinsky symphony. Inconsistency permeates through her handwriting, her psyche. Echoing the flutters of the butterfly, her thoughts palpitate. She came to understand why her scores fluctuate, running in a zigzag line, eluding all efforts of explaining, as she looked at her straight A friends' handwriting. Block by block, carefully crafted, one after another, the letters mirror the rhythm of their mental pulses. This is how they work, in chronological order, with consciousness wholly wrapped up in the present, flowing in peace with the current of time. Such peace has been a luxury that she could hardly afford. All too often her mind leaps in anguish, spanning the past and the future. Memories and prophecies burst, springing out of submerged consciousness, totally unbidden. Confronted with a test, she would jump back to the time she did fine, the time she did wrong, and forth to what would happen if she failed. Sometimes she burst into tears, when her mother kissed her goodnight, as her mind raced ahead to the time of loss. She paces frantically, gobbling up all at once, in the most unladylike manner. Her mechanics are inherently flawed. Floundering through the morass of tenses, she tries in vain to label her experience, yet never succeeds. The past, the present, the future, one engulfs another. She is a time vagabond.
To tread water in the chrono-maelstrom, she sips life in small modicum, filtering reality like coffee. Words sprinkle the page sparingly, as the white space seeps in, submerging them with long lapses of silence, the silence that soaks up her uneventful life. As life flashes through her eyes like a fast-paced movie, she needs the white space all the more, the lapse of silence during which she switches to her hibernation mood, replaying her whole day, searching for the cues she missed. The performance of happiness put on by those dearest to her, the smile they squeezed out in pain, the jokes they tossed to keep her off. She was afraid that they suffered alone without her knowing, that she has been too busy to go beyond asking "How are you?", and would let it go as soon as they say "I'm fine, thanks". Negligence is a vice that she would not forgive herself, and she plans to continue with her life diet, determined not to cram full, and thus poison, her claustrophobic world. Humans often cram in more than they can digest. They travel too much and meet too many people, feeding on samples, sliding on the surface. She once heard a man bragging how he had met the egotist, the unassuming, the self-centered, the altruist, citing a collection of labels rather than individuals. She smiled and replied that she had also met all of those, in one person. Perhaps that's all she could handle. Sacrificing breadth for depth. No one can have both.
She has left the page scarred, as she chronicled the tale with her sprawling handwriting, the story of a warped, restless mind striving for balance. It was not a pretty story unfurled with an end in mind, a solution to smooth things out, for she fails constantly in her endeavor, for life is no blank page but a laboratory dedicated to a long-time struggle, sandwiched with layers of good and bad. This is how she wants to pack herself up, in time and space, as an unfolding project, writing at a cozy dinner table with her sweaty palm, while the rosy night of Saigon brushes lightly on her nose, and everyone must already be fast asleep. She is writing here, in the knowledge that they will be there, caressing over her words, and somehow in the flow of inconsistency, of time flooding and distance widening, both are reconciled, with hands touched and eyes met.
