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Freshman Memoir Assignment

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Freshman Memoir Assignment  Empty Freshman Memoir Assignment

Post by krk101 Wed Dec 14, 2016 7:43 pm

cringe memoir I'm choosing to share so I can contribute to this very cool website forum. Very Happy

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Kaitlin Kerr
Ms. Gallagher
Honors Language Arts, Period 1
26 February 2015

Lunchroom Woes
Sitting at lunch by yourself is a huge bummer. There is no way to sugar-coat it. It sucks. Especially when your, “friends” were supposed to be there. You’re alone in a massive crowd of familiar faces, a strange and unusual torture. You stare at your food intensely, a school pizza as tasteless as the Styrofoam tray it’s served on. It’s what the other kids bought. But you don’t want to be the kid that eats weird food. The chocolate milk that comes with it is repulsively water-like, but you sip it, quietly staring at the lunchroom tray. It’s the best way to avoid the sympathetic gaze of the lunch aid, or the wayward glances from other tables, or the touring guidance counselor—the person of problems, who, at any moment might ask another table to invite you over. (Which is mortifying.)

You hear some sympathetic voices from girls in your grade,
“Look, she’s eating all alone.”
“Awwwh, that’s so sad.”
But their owners turn out to be apathetic, “Did you see last night’s episode of PLL?”
“Oh my god don’t get me STARTED.”
That’s what you’ve been reduced to, listening to other table’s conversation. Does that makes you Kaitlin, the eavesdropping loser? You’re disgusted by their fake-sympathy, but would have still enjoyed the company. Where were they? They should be back by now!

I usually sat with two friends at lunch, just the three of us alone at one big table. I used to think it was a really cool metaphor, just the three of us alone, in the huge lunch table of a world. Until they started to get up. They’d give each other this look, then leave the table giggling, telling me that they were going to the bathroom. But they would never come back. They weren’t “crazy popular,” going off telling gossip. They weren’t blonde with pink miniskirts like in the movies. They weren’t trying to be mean, honestly they didn’t even know they were hurting me. They just left.

You finish your gross food. Throw away the tray. Finish the watery milk. Throw away the carton. Check your watch. Watch it tick by a full minute, agonizingly slowly. They still haven’t come back. Deep down in your heart, you knew they never would. It wasn’t the first time.

So you go back to class early, telling the lunch aid you want to grab your jacket from your locker. It’s the best way to stop looking like the geek eating alone. You walk back as slow as possible, hoping beyond hope the bell will ring before you get back, to avoid looking like the nerd that got to class early. You stare at the white walls. The dirty green and white tiled floor. Breathe in puberty’s unforgiving stench. Read the ‘inspirational’ posters for the billionth time. Listen to your “friend’s” girlish giggles as you pass the bathroom. Avoid people’s eyes. Try to keep yours dry.

But, what’s that noise?

It sounds like people. They are talking. Shouting. Laughing.

It’s coming from a classroom, C100. Dozens of people are eating their lunch in there. Geeks and nerds just like you. People milling around discussing books, rather than soap operas. People clumped together at desks with open notebooks, cramming for a test next period. People eating their homemade lunches, that of strange food admitting piquant aromas, which they’d be mocked for in the cafeteria.

When I quietly slipped into that classroom for the first time, I felt defeated. I felt like I didn’t have any friends, but little did I know I would make some of the best in there. They accepted me without explanation, and are my closet friends now. To this day, I eat lunch with all of them, together at one big lunch table of a world, never leaving another behind.

I allowed myself to be walked away from for too long, it made me think I wasn’t wanted. It made me feel alone and broken. It made me hate myself. But when I walked out of that classroom, back to class that first day, I didn’t feel defeated, I felt elated.

Don’t allow yourself to eat lunch alone, your best friends are waiting just a hallway away.

krk101

Posts : 1
Join date : 2016-12-10
Age : 24
Location : Funroe

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Freshman Memoir Assignment  Empty Re: Freshman Memoir Assignment

Post by sydneyera Thu Dec 22, 2016 5:58 pm

since we both did this in freshman gally's, i thought i'd share mine. it's worth the horrible embarrassment because when i was reading it, i was reminded of lost.
Like a Star @ heaven

The Small Protector
When I saw anyone, I unconsciously painted them behind my eyes. By no means was I an artist, unless painting Crayola waterproof, nontoxic paint on old rocks during summertime counted. But, my mind involuntary connected people’s bodies and actions with tangled images of how I viewed them. My grandmother a skeleton with beautybush blossom bones that hovered in heavy haze, my 6th grade math teacher a bundle of burning hair, and I, a “only-color-inside-the-lines-with-that-one-blue-crayon-because-it-will-look-neater” sketch of a worried small bird being pushed out of the nest to fly from a 90s frayed coloring book.
My internal paintings did kinda vary.
I had stained my mind with those perceptions so deeply that they almost appeared as the people themselves. I now realize that they were all apart of me, all connected to me in a way that cannot be explained through words. But I hadn’t then.
As far back as I can remember, though, I had never painted someone as a protector of the small, anxious blue bird until I painted my mom. I can’t count back the days or months when my mom lost her tight grasp of that protector stance she had over me. I can’t count the minutes or the seconds I held my breath after I felt the perceptions of the people I had paintings about seeped from my skull. I could only count all of the intricate limbs and the small details of my paintings I created crawling from my airy mind.
At 7:36 A.M. the rain fell as she did.
Something shatters along with the stance she had in the house. Her body didn’t writhe or shudder at first, but I could see the protective armor that she once wore melt and flood and destroy our living room, staining the scratched wooden floors and dog-hair coated furniture. I stumble, mesmerized, towards her body, never seeing my mother in this amount of pain in my life, not once without her protective armor.
My knees cave in like the bird’s in the familiar, tattered coloring book and my mom murmurs something quickly under her breath.
“My arm is broken.”
I blank, frightened on what to do next.
“Sydney, you have to trust me.”
Quickly, I begin rambling aimlessly, fluttering around her while silently begging the rain to stop. No one else remains in the house, except for the shadows that leap from the flickering kitchen lights left on from the night before. A protector did not scrunch their chestnut eyelashes in pain, a guardian did not murmur under shaky, minty breaths, my mother did not cry.
But, then, I know that I can’t cry right now either.
Our breathing, lungs which once matched pace in inhaling the familiar air of honeysuckle freshener, becomes more distant. Mine becoming calmer, hers becoming more frantic. Mom’s eyes hesitantly open, anxiety strewn across her face. My brown ones meet her anxious sandy coppers that have red lines etched between her opposite eye lids and I think that on this autumn day at 7:38 A.M. on a rainy morning with the smell of toothpaste-honeysuckle Febreze air-freshener and the soft sound of storms and jagged breaths -- I saw what people call a spiritual awakening.
“Mom, you have to trust me,” I say, but not shakily, and I don’t ramble this time.
Watching my protector in pain flooded away my own and the armor that melted from her body rose up my fingertips and up my arms and up my chest and up my neck and up my face and through my eye sockets and goddamn it hurt so bad and nothing would ever hurt more than this, but I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t control the flight of that anxious small bird and the blue crayon flying from my hand and scribbling the frayed pages of my childhood.
Confusion fills me. Mostly over the fact that my skull doesn’t crack apart like the rocks that are too old to paint in the summer. I honestly thought my mind would self-destruct after my paintings left, but, then, I know for sure that I don’t need them. I have one new self-portrait painting that I know has the ability to replace every one of them:
The Small Protector.
sydneyera
sydneyera

Posts : 2
Join date : 2016-12-08
Age : 23
Location : dogs

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