First Person Singular: a College Prompt

In communication, we tend to avoid using the first person singular.  So, we pretty diligently avoid the use of “I,” “me,” “my” and the like when referring to ourselves.  Most readers want to read about things to which they can relate and communication that suffers from “I” strain can turn them off.  An exception would be a blog about an unusual first-person story.  Please write a blog of a couple of pages on this, telling the story chronologically. 

This is great writing practice and a good way to get “I” and “me” out of your writing. 

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Once upon a time, there was a little girl whose life at home did not feel much like “home” at all: instead of a doting mother making dinner in the kitchen, there were violent people making loud noises . . . and not enough to eat, most of the time. She knew what “home” should look like because she saw it on TV and had friends at school whose moms packed full lunch boxes with notes inside. She didn’t often talk about “home.”

Instead, she escaped it.

Not physically, like in some TV shows about kids who run away – or better, those who get moved to a real home by the police – no, she learned from the grownups that to run away or get taken away would be even worse, somehow. So she stayed at whatever place her mom was at.

But she did escape.

She said, much later, that she remembered her first memory: it was of a big angry man yelling at her mom, bursting through the door of the motel room where they slept, punching her mom in the face and splattering blood all over her blankie. The angry man and her mom threw away the blankie after they made up over beer and cigarettes, while she cowered on the corner of the bed. This was before she learned how to escape.

Before she learned how to read.

She remembered her first memory, and she remembered her first poem, written in a spiral-bound floral hardcover notebook with The Serenity Prayer on front. It was called Smoke, Smoke, Smoke, and it was about how her eyes burned from the gray clouds her mom’s friends made while they got loud and drunk every night, how it was hard to sleep because of the noise and the smell, and how she would be free of it all someday.

By then, she did know how to escape. Anyone could tell, just by reading her poems, that she had already found her way out.

When she learned how to read, she devoured books by the dozens, by the hundreds. She learned that the limit at the library for how many books she could take out at a time was actually 100, and she used that allowance as often as she could, filling her backpack and arms with books about dragons, magic, and powerful, far away people.

This was until the night the smoke wasn’t just from cigarettes. That night, she really did escape, if only for a little while, down the street to call 9-1-1 from the neighbor’s house. She watched the firetrucks come and saw the black spot that used to be her apartment the next day. 100 books had burned, but she never had a chance to explain to the library what had happened to them all; she just moved to a new library.

When she was in high school, the little girl learned of a writing contest. To enter, she had to read a book by Ayn Rand called Anthem, which was also about far away places and powerful people, but less about magic than it was about escaping. Her stepdad, the angry man from her first memory, didn’t let her enter contests or do much at all, really. But she read the book anyway.

It was about a world where everything, all decisions and jobs and even words, was controlled by some ruling council of people. In it, there were only “people.” There was what “we” wanted, what was good for “us,” and the way things were for “all.” There didn’t seem to be any choice, and that was supposed to be a good thing for “us.” What was, simply was.

Until a person, a man, learned to read.

He, too, learned to escape.

He and I are the same, I think, now that I am older and free. There’s power in “me.”

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