Personal Essay
1st Place: Asha Dees, “Yegna”
It was a perfect night for a photoshoot.
The air in Addis Ababa smelled like thunderstorms, meskel flowers, and diesel fumes. Our footsteps sounded muffled as we stumbled onto the roof, buoyed by our own laughter. We arranged ourselves in the dark, basking in the glow of each other’s company.
Our giggles echoed in the quiet night. We pulled each other close and punctured the air with our bright smiles.
The camera flashed once and the air was filled with the crows of our happiness.
The camera flashed twice and captured the night full of childlike joy.
We raced and screeched into the night, trying to be the first to grasp the polaroid as it tumbled onto the ground. We howled in celebration and shook the still towards the stars and satellites dotting the night sky as the muted black transformed into an explosion of color.
Our faces, our stories, our triumphs in friendship: it was all right there in the photograph. The mischievous grins, our heads thrown back in laughter, fists of victory pumped in the air, and sparkling eyes taking it all in. My best friends and I, standing together, united.
Looking back, I can see that our friendship was a gift born of the choices we made to strive towards understanding. It was a choice to eat from the same gebeta together, sharing Ethiopian food and our own stories with each other. It was a choice to seek each other out as we explored the country we all called home, playing soccer, finding our voices, and having new adventures together. It was a choice to celebrate our differences, the things that made up our cultures, our past, and our dreams.
In the city of Bahir Dar, we had expressed our gratitude for the opportunities we were given. On bumpy car rides, we had sung along to songs familiar and foreign, forming playlists to the melody of glee. At school, we had swapped ideas about how we could contribute to the betterment of our world and acted on them in classrooms, in clubs, and in conversation.
My friends and I taught each other to find the joy in the unexpected. My friends and I learned the importance of curiosity. My friends and I grew to recognize the strength in vulnerability. My friends and I from the United States, France, South Korea, India, China, Croatia, Harari, and Tigray found home in each other. Though we are now separated by distance, their lives, their experiences, and their ideas are forever entwined with mine.
As that night that smelled like thunderstorms, meskel flowers, and diesel fumes faded, someone found a forgotten sharpie on the ground. They wrote the word perfect in a messy scrawl on the polaroid, the beloved emblem of the gift of our friendship.
It was a perfect photo because it was ours.
It was a perfect night because it was ours.
Our perfect night lasts forever on the polaroid proudly hanging on my wall.
2nd Place: Sidney London, “Untitled”
Mommy! I reach out to her. I want to touch her, hug her and know that everything is alright. Something rises out of the darkness—though I am not able to see it yet as it blends into the thickness of the night. A tentacle plummets toward my hand at an inhuman-like speed. It's black, not the black of the night, but the black of doom and despair. I scream and rush to pull my hand back to my side, for it innocently strayed far from home, but now ended up on the wrong side of the town. The thing makes its way out of the shadows as it comes to stand right in between me and my mom, his dark figure extinguishing all the light. I stand petrified as he looks me up and down. His body is about three times the size of mine, with 5 of my thighs being able to make up his arm. He looks a bit like the devil, but it must be his evil twin—the one who chose the path of sin over the unconditional love of his family. There he stands, with wings the size of skyscrapers and horns that sprout out of his head as if they were healthy at a certain point, but are now rotten and wet with fungus. But of course, a sundae is never made without the cherry on top: a menacing smile that holds the sorrow of millions of children in its grasp. And in that moment, I knew I was to become one more of them.
* * *
At one minute, you are an object of your parents making, bred through the Disney channel and rituals of the abc’s. There is not a care to be seen on the broad horizons of your mind as you dance through your days with ease. You are innocent, unaware of the true malice in the world, thinking the most terrifying thing it has to offer is the monster under your bed. Your parents try to shield you from anything that could ruin this innocence. Hide the news, hide the scary channels, hide the big girl books -- she's not ready. My mind was never truly ready to face the world, yet it had an abrupt wake up call in first grade.
I was sitting on Ms. Meyer’s color-coated rug as we were practicing our rhyming words. There was not a care in the world until suddenly, there was. At first, the thought merely slipped into my mind to taunt me; it was simply a joke I would sweep out of my mind as soon as I saw the mess it began to make. I tried to think of something else, something better, but it refused to go as it forced its talons into the tissue of my brain. The thought, childish at first, now began to morph as it turned into a bloodthirsty monster. My mind was out of service, as it seemingly could not regulate my thoughts as they spiraled further and further down a deep dark hole.
* * *
What is this thought you may ask? Only everyone’s worst nightmare. Everyone is scared of it, yet they are more mature and know it to be unlikely. But see, when you are a painstakingly skinny 1st grader coming off your innocence-induced high, your mind can think the unspeakable to be true. There and then, birthed over a year worth of torture to poor innocent S*** by a malicious monster named Separation Anxiety, and Separation Anxiety liked to control every little aspect of her life, until there was very little left to truly live.
3rd Place: Emma Li, “Mathematics”
I never thought I could do it, and I finally did.
I was in fifth grade. The classroom is connected to the outside; it is wet and a little old and usually smells like rusty coins inside on rainy days. My classmates are usually chasing, laughing and interacting with each other, and the sound of the laughter almost covers the sound of the ringing bells. Nevertheless, when the math teacher came, the whole aura changed. It becomes quiet and calm and the sense of gap makes it even more obvious. He is a brand-new teacher in our school with a serious-looking face and fiendish expression. Everyone outside of the classroom has been discussing him in the first two weeks about how professional but bad tempered he is.
Me, as a downhearted child who seldom smiled and who failed almost every math test in the past four years, do not know how to confront the new math teacher. It even became a familiar experience for me, to fail the math test and attach a disappointed emotion to seeing my scores. I knew I lacked any ability to learn mathematics even though it is an important subject.
Nevertheless, life is full of surprises and sometimes we change because of small or naive reasons. I somehow find the new math teacher is very similar to my dad because they both have a strict looking face and my dad is such a serious person when dealing with my grades. He even cares about it more than his job although I was just an elementary school kid at that time. My dad was always a straight--A student in his school years, especially in his strongest area -- math. He was always especially angry with me when I failed the math test, so he usually pushed the pressure on me and I felt I was a really stupid person when my dad shouted at me, because I had tried to work on math, but it didn’t improve my math score when it came to tests. And I am not going to give the math teacher a chance like the way my dad educated me. After class, while everyone has been discussing the math teacher, I was imagining the math teacher shouted at me about the poor grade I got and talking to my parents via phone, then I whispered to myself that here comes a big thing, and I must study super hard so that I do not receive the same outcome of the math teacher as it was to my dad. And it changed my whole mindset later on.
I know there is a huge gap between math and my other courses, but this time I was surprised that I didn’t think that much because I was too scared the new math teacher would educate me like the way my dad did. Therefore, I decided to set other subjects aside and study really hard the best I can even though I have not succeeded before.
But who knows?
I turned my attention to the course “Mathematics”. Outside of school, I worked on practices and math problems related to the course, to improve my math. A few weeks later, we had a first-quarter test. I was nervous and excited because I wanted to see the results of a few weeks of self-training. I straightened my clothes, cleared my desk, and threw myself out of the world just to keep myself focused enough to prepare for the quarter test. The time came for the test. My hands were shaking, my heart was beating really fast, but I always checked myself before going to the next problem. A few days later, the math teacher had finished grading the tests. And then, he walked toward my desk slowly and rested himself on my desk. At that moment, I thought, this is the end of my life because I thought I must have gotten a poor grade again. However, this time is a different story. He raised his mouth up a little, clearing his throat as if he was going to have an important announcement. Nobody knew what he was going to say, until…...he said I am the only one that got a hundred percent, the full score, in this quarter test. “No way, he must be kidding”, I said to myselves. But then, he turned to a serious looking face again. Then, I know it might be true. My body was deadlocked on the chair, my heart was beating super fast as if I was having a heart attack, and hands were cold and sweating. Everyone in the class who knew me in the past few years were also surprised as well for my outstanding test grade, and unlike usual breaking times within periods, the classroom was abnormally silent this time at this moment, and I even remember one of the pencils had dropped in those 15 seconds of silence. That day was the best day in my life and was so impressive. I never thought I would be able to break through that wall for the rest of my life since 4 years of math testing failure, but the story changed and I changed.
After that brilliant moment, I became much more confident in myself, and finally put myself in the same stage as my peers. I cannot forget the moment when my math teacher announced my math score to everybody. It was thrilling. And now, I even decided to major in Mathematics, which is a turning point that I thought I would never be able to reach in my lifetime. It was also the moment that I think I can reach a certain level after my hard work, and it can be just anything.
There are so many difficulties in the competitive world right now. Sometimes our brain overreacts to the problems we might have in order to self-defence, sometimes we do not trust ourselves that we could do or reach things at a certain level, sometimes we do not believe the miracles will happen on ourselves. We hardly realize that we all can make such an impact to ourselves as long as you want to. Life is full of bottlenecks, and people who can break through it can dominate their life which is also the cause that separates people.
