The Story of Book

Some life experiences are too big to tell as a personal story, you simply can't put yourself through reliving it. You do know that's what storytelling is. Reliving the past, making up the future, and expressing everything in between. That's why I write, it really keeps me sane. The thing is, though, I don't like to tell my own story, I like to write "Book". In a confusing way "Book" is my story, it's just not about me. "Book" is about echo. echo is me, just not me, me. Ok, you know what, let's try this again, forget you ever read this first intro and I'll write another one, one that starts at the beginning.

The eighth grade consists of about three main components. Stress, finding who you are, and obnoxious brats who think they know everything. We all have a personal experience that we can't share directly, maybe it'll hurt someone's feelings, create unnecessary drama in your life, or worse of all, embarrass you. In order to keep these things from happening, we just dust these stories under the carpet, never to been seen or heard from again. I don't think that's healthy. By doing this we just lock our feelings away, and it makes them worse.

In an attempt to escape from the crazy world that was the halls of Briar Main Middle (GOOOOOO MOUNTAIN BEARS!), I discovered writing.

About a fourth of the way through my eighth-grade career, I was assigned a peculiar project that I didn't understand at the time. My grammar teacher walked through the plain white door frame onto the hard, blue and white tile floor. I was seated in my usual seat (second from the right in the middle of five rows), tapping a newly created rhythm onto the face of my desk. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the damp, rainy, fall day through the window. I was sitting between Angela Jets, who was chewing hot pink bubblegum and doodling hearts on her notebook, and Jax Peters, a tall lanky boy who lacked not only a brain, but also a proportional set of limbs for his body. My teacher immediately began talking in her quick, sharp, fast-paced dialect that I'm convinced she made up. Her long red-brown hair fell in loose curls as she fluttered around the room, still talking. Finally, after about twenty minutes of nothing, I noticed a silence. This was not any silence though, this was the "Oh, God. She's assigning something" silence. She wrote on the expo board in swift, short strokes of the pen.

"Create a friend"

What does that even mean, and why are we doing it in grammar class? I shortly found out that we were to simply do a character sketch of an ideal friend for us. I was a lot more excited before I knew what we had to do. She gave us the rest of class to start our project and told us it was due the next day in class. I set to work, let's just say that it didn't go so well. In the next twenty minutes of class, I got exactly nothing done. Zero. There were no words on the page.

The rest of the day was reasonably uneventful, I went home, took a shower, ate some yogurt (it was cherry thanks for asking), and then sat down to do my homework. The time had come. An ideal friend. Alright, think. Nothing. This was due tomorrow, I had to do something! Ok, I got this, just focus. Finally, I started to put pen to paper.

I started with my friends physical appearance. I wanted a female friend, ya. A female friend with long, soft blonde hair. Her eyes are big, and unbelievably blue. She has long eyelashes that are dark, and they contrast her pearly white complexion. She's cute, with soft features, and a gentle touch. Her smile is white like snow, and her lips are soft with a rose like tint. She is beautiful.

At this point I had broken a barrier. It seemed to me that I had created something oddly beautiful, and I liked this feeling. I figured that a creature as lovely as this needed a beautiful, soft interior, so I started to create her personality.

"Elegant" was the first word that jumped into my mind, but I wondered to myself 'how can you have an elegant personality?'. I'm looking back now at this and laughing, because now I have met a good many people with elegant personalities, I was just too immature to see it then.