And thank you Cora.
The assignment: In order to help us know more about your background and interests, we would like you to tell a personal story (i.e., non-fictional) of a time when words, whether written or spoken, sung or performed, have been meaningful for you.
Didn’t Come Off
I could have used a regular pen, which would have been much quicker. But using this pen, I have to focus on every word, every letter, every line that I scratch into the paper.
The poem gradually makes its way across the tea-soaked, crinkly paper. The marks left are only footprints – footprints of meaning – for the words of the poem. The poem is only painting a feeling, an idea. The poem, like the window it speaks of, can only frame the emotions and the lessons of the Holocaust.
“Look through a window, and then open it.” That was the lesson I created for the Holocaust project we did in eighth grade. The words of the lesson were born from a poem – and the poem was born from a glance at a rain-soaked window – which I had written some months before. The poem was about looking through a window for the – sometimes difficult – truth, then trying to actually open the window and do something to change a bad situation. Upon receiving the project rubric from my teacher, as its neatly boxed-in possibilities jumped off the page at me, I remembered the poem, and so was able to subdue the overwhelming possibilities that ricocheted around inside my brain. One picture remained in my imagination – that of a window, adorned with quotes about the Holocaust and the four sub-lessons as assigned by my teacher represented on each of four window panes.
It was perfect. Little had I known, but the poem was indirectly about the Holocaust.
And little did I know, but that picture that I thought would remain only inside of my head – like so many other pictures – would come to life. My English teacher provided me with a real window to display the project on from her farm – an old one with its paint chipping away – and it was more than I could have asked for. It already told a story. The various components of the project – the hand-written poem, the window with pictures and quotes pasted on it, and two picture frames, one for each side of the window, each depicting a different side of the Holocaust atrocities – would come together, I knew, to create a story laden with meaning.
Usually I become impatient – preoccupied, even – about the final result of a project like this. But the process of making this one was, I believe, a large part of the project’s worth to me.
I bend down close to the paper, the shadow of my head blocking the lamplight which shyly permeates the room. I feel its rough spots under the splayed fingertips of my left hand. Every time my pen runs out of ink, I must lift my hand and let it fly silently above the landscape of the paper like a little bird, to take a bath of deep black ink. I put myself completely into this poem by etching its life into these pieces of paper.
And by doing so, I bring the poem to life.
The words swirl around and around in my head, like the water around a drain, as I take the long seconds to scratch each individual letter into the paper. And in this swirling vortex, a memory from earlier in the day, when I was just beginning to write out the poem, surfaces.
We were working on our projects in English class. I sat at a desk in the corner, and my friend had been sitting nearby, making handprints on her project board with red ink to look like blood. I didn’t notice her absence until she walked back into the room from washing her hands, made eye contact with me, and said quietly,
“It didn’t come off.”
The ink, that is.
I looked at her, and she looked at me, and for a moment her face looked stricken, stricken with the discovery that it just wouldn't come off. But somehow, I think she may have expected that – a pain like that, even just the representation of a pain so severe, could never wash away. Now here it was, right in front of her, looking like blood.
Never for one moment did I think she was simply complaining or making an observational comment. Between the time when the words left her lips and when they were transmitted to my brain, there was never a time when I didn't know what she really meant.
I started to turn away, and then I looked back again and narrowed my eyes just a little bit, to face her and to face the fact, to let it sink in. I turned quickly back to my own work, and it may have seemed like I didn't pay attention to what she said, didn't notice, but it hit me like a freight train. I felt winded. My hand was a dead weight, my eyes empty holes.
Looking back on it, I wonder if I should have said something in response. Did she think I didn’t care? With two words and ten letters left, I can feel worry begin to disturb my peace. Worry? With eight letters left, I realize how ridiculous it is for me to feel guilty about not responding to something that profound. I wouldn’t have known what to say. With six letters left, I remind myself that those were powerful words, words which both hurt and healed my day. They were words which needed respect, and that respect came that moment in silence. With four letters left, I feel the searing pain of what those words implied – that the pain, the hunger, the suffering, the grief, never go away. With two letters left, I am glad I decided to hand-write my poem so that I can treat it with the respect its subject deserves.
And with zero letters left, I begin to cry.
For once, I have no more words.
