Avoiding Fears

1. Tall Wood
2. The Word
3. 5 Broken Pencils
4. As opposed to dark
5. Hairs

Tall Wood

Walking down the road surrounded by nature all the time, I didn’t appreciate what nature did. As I looked for my mom in the football field parking lot, I kept an open eye for everything around me, just in case she appears. I looked everywhere while standing in place and saw expensive cars, shopping bags, and parents of others. I saw trash cans, pillow clouds, and trees like dinosaurs. These trash cans were full of trash and even recyclable material. The fluffy clouds looked like they were moving across the blue ocean sky. The humongous trees rose up from their roots far in the ground. The trees had bright green leaves. I waited for my mom to come out of the store. Whenever I felt like panicking, I stared at the trees and took deep breaths like running from a bear. The trees waved at me as the wind blew and leaves lightly lifted away from the branch into my hand. The thought of mom coming back was carved onto the bark of the tree. Every time this bark chipped off or was chipped off, I lost the image.

I never appreciated trees. My basic description of a tree was wood, that, like plants, produce oxygen. When I looked at the trees this time, I saw a huge body of life. The tree had many friends. He was surrounded by many other trees. They surrounded the perimeter of the parking lot and kept everything that belonged in, in. The tree was a permeable border, it let people come in and let people out. Without the help of my fellow trees, my mom would leave. I knew the trees would not let me down.

The whole time, i played with the trees. I laughed with them, waved with them, and climbed on them. People stared but the trees would fend them off.

I never understood the power of the tree. It brought my mom to me and me to my mom. I stared at the tree as we left. Birds like eagles had occupied it and sneaky squirrels had their eyes on it. It would have company as I left.

   

The Word

When it was time for bad words to finally arrive, it arrived. I was waiting for the word to finally pop up.

School was the last place I thought the word would fall in. With so many teachers watching and so many other students who could snitch. I was watching my classmates take a test like it was brain surgery. They tapped and winked at each other like they were on a secret mission, just taking a test. They never stayed silent during the test even if they were not cheating on the test. I eyed the teacher in the corner of my eye. She looked at me like I was doing something wrong while all the other kids were talking.

When I walked up to turn in my test, she looked at the test then to me before taking it from my hand.

I said, Why can everyone else talk?
She replied, and spoke to the rest of the class, “QUIET”.
Shocked, I walked back slowly to my seat and quietly down without making a noise. I sat with my hands crossed and stared at the clock. The talking continued and one student began throwing balls of paper at another. The other student replied with a sharp pencil thrown back at the first person. It hit the student around the eye area.

He yelled, “OW” and the WORD.

The next thing I noticed was he was gone. After the teacher did not tolerate the language, he left holding his eye and looked ahead for his mom.

After that, the students began to say that word just for fun. I, maybe once or twice, stopped and saved its use for emergencies.

I heard, “Hey...Why, what is one plus one.”

I answered with the word in my mind, “toe.... two sorry.”

In class, HE was back. and calmed down. I laughed at him when he came in and as he sat down, I said his word. He said, It wasn’t funny, my eye hurt when his pencil hit me. Can I borrow a sharpener?

I said no, but that word was what I started to think of.

The thrower began to throw little balls of paper at me, and I asked him to stop. He thought it was funny that the balls bounced off my face, so he kept going and threw a larger one that looked like an orange. I stormed the WORD out and the room froze. This time,  I was on my own, in the dark dreary dull corner because of my disruption. Was the WORD worse than what the thrower did?

5 broken pencils

Tests sucked. Some students liked tests, I did not. They were in it for the grade because it would boost them up. Some students began to care about their grades at an early age. I never understood what they were until the end of sixth grade because I got “3s” on most of my grades. It did not matter as long as my parents would not get mad, they would say, it is OK, but you have to start doing better when you get older. I said, OK, and did not know if i could pull it off.

In class, i sat at my seat and stared at the clock and board as usual. “Put your stuff away and take out just a pencil”. Surprised, I put my papers on my desk away and scooped my hand into my backpack for a pencil. I said, “Hurray”. I felt so many sticks of wood in my backpack and fingered around to lift one up. The ones i lifted were broken in half. One after another, until, I found a pencil tip in my backpack and whipped it out between my fingers. This, I thought, saved me from embarrassment from walking up the classroom and asking the teacher for a pencil. Even with a pencil tip, i was glad.

As opposed to dark.

As opposed to dark, light would always from me happiness. At  night I sleep. At night, I avoid seeing even though it is nearly impossible to see. At night it is like the Earth is a room, and the light is blocked out. I like the sun shining its bright light down instead of the darkness.

In the dark, i would stumble past walls and bang my hip onto the side of the door and fall. I sat there waiting, too scared to move. As I saw the smiling sun rise just a little, I ran to my bed and jumped in. I did not get much sleep, but at least the sun saved me. In the light, i ran like there was no dark after me. The light is where I am alive and not resting away from the darkness.

The one day, I went upstairs on my own, was the only day that I needed to jump into my drawing bed.

Hairs

Everybody in our family has different skin tones. My Papa’s skin is like a cardboard box. It is not too dark nor too light. It is a darker shade of brown. His skin shines in the sun at the pool. It is often rough and thick, sometimes even dry. And me, my skin is light and dark. It doesn’t burn much because I try to avoid the sunlight. His skin is sensitive and easily burnt by the sun. He does need to apply a lot of sunscreen whenever exposed to the sunlight. And the turtle, his skin is scaly.

But my mother’s skin, my mother’s skin, is very pale. She does not expose her skin to the sun. If any method possible, she will try to avoid the sun. It does not ever turn dark because as soon as it becomes red, Mama escapes the sun. It glows in the sun instead of shining. It does not dry easily after washing vegetables. My Papa’s skin is rough and hard. It is the skin of a turtle without the scales. Her skin is soft when she is holding you and easily scratched. The dark skin, the glowing skin, and the hidden skin at the pool, all at once.