An old journal entry, circa 2015.
“This girl goes to your middle school. She has created a website about global communication and won an award for it. She’s been to India and China, analyzing the education systems and non-profit organizations that educate poor children,” my mother said, pointing at the iPad screen. “She has something meaningful to write about for her college essay. Your sister went to Nationals in seventh grade. What have you done from when you were little, to now, that stands out? An accomplishment you could write about for your college essay?” I looked down, holding back tears. “You used to do spelling bees. Last year, in sixth grade, your poem was published in the literary magazine. Why don’t you put in time and effort and enter a state writing contest, instead of watching hours and hours of TV episodes? You think you’re pretty? Go become an actress in a movie or TV show. Stop wasting your time doing pointless things and do something useful for once!” She glanced at the clock. “Go to sleep.”
Her words were sharp and painful and hit me like bullets. I ran out of the room into my bedroom, my will crumpling and tears streaming down my cheeks. Eyes red, nose stuffy, and resolve crushed, I grabbed my journal & began to write this...
Goldfinch: Vignettes from tenth-grade English, circa 2017.
Fear is a goldfinch tattooed on my collarbone. It perches on my clavicle, flitters here and there. It twitters innocuously, sending twinges through my chest. Most of the time, it nests in the dimple near the base of my neck, but sometimes, it’s sent into a frenzy until it swoops up, wings constricting around my throat, bright sun-yellow feathers flashing, tiny beak tearing into my breath, and I wonder how such a tiny bird could hurt so much.
*
My mother used to watch a TV show about homicide, and I watched with her and my sister as a man with a serious voice would describe motives and methods of real-life murders, reenactors stalking women and stabbing victims on the screen. My mind knew it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, but the nine-year-old me that would stay awake, listening to the creaking of the house, watching the cars driving behind us at night to see if they were following us, didn’t know that.
*
Fears are sly. The first time I see them, they swoop down. That should be enough of a scare, but before I know it, they begin to dig a cavern in me. I don’t notice until a long time later that there is a certain chamber in my heart that seems to be emptier than the others, that cannot pump blood no matter how hard I try to breathe.
*
[ REDACTED ]
It’s funny, how fear can just take over at the calmest of times. It was calm last summer: we were eating at the breakfast buffet in the Tokyo Hilton. My thighs, clad in shorts, were sticking to the leather seats, and I was enjoying a pleasant bowl of yogurt with peaches and bananas. The next thing I knew, my mother was screaming at me about how ungrateful I was that I wouldn’t even be able to get into Yale or Harvard to repay her for our vacation, I was bawling in the middle of the hotel as baffled visitors glanced at us, and my sister was cussing out my mother for the first time as I prayed she wouldn’t torture me more. I completely forgot about my unfinished bowl of yogurt, which was a shame. It could’ve made my tears taste sweet instead of salty.
*
Fear is sneaky, chirping and pecking away. It doesn’t seem to do much damage until I notice. Oh. It had chipped away a smile. Oh. That’s what I thought when I stood in front of CVS in August and my sister hugged me goodbye, proceeding to walk back to her new apartment. Oh. I was alone. It didn’t feel weird at first; my parents nagged all the way home as per usual, but my best friend, my savior, had sailed away on her quest for greatness. I was left, waving from the shore.
*
I started to drown, freeze in those coastal waters. You know the warning signs at swimming pools that warn toddlers’ parents that kids can drown in a few inches of water? I drowned in zero. You know, when my friend told me she and my other best friend were dating that same summer, the goldfinch pecked my throat dry. I couldn’t speak. When she told me over the phone, the gold-dipped sunshine streaming in through my ceiling-high windows danced ice on my toes and wet my pillows with salt. I should’ve considered eating some yogurt again.
*
A while ago, a little goldfinch paid me a visit to the window across from my work desk. It peered in through the window, pecked forcefully at the glass, and fluttered its wings at me, casting a multi-feathered silhouette onto the desk, before taking off and returning throughout the afternoon. It was beautiful: its feathers were golden-yellow, a crown of ivory black sat atop its head, and it cocked its head at me inquisitively whenever I glanced at it.
I was flattered.
At some point, I named the bird Ed. I flushed with pleasure whenever I heard him flittering outside, shuffling around at the windowsill, always pecking at the glass. I inadvertently started to look for him when he wasn’t there, started to expect him to be there, started to worry he wouldn’t be there. What would I do if he wasn’t perched at my window? No one else would be left.
Ed paid me a visit the next afternoon, the morning after that. And then, he vanished without a trace. I had fantasized that he was peering in through the window because he’d found me an interesting human companion, or maybe I bore his soul from his previous or next life. Truthfully, Ed probably learned over the course of a few days that he, apparently, could not fly through the transparent glass to the pretty fake rose sitting on my desk.
*
It’s okay. Instead of flying away to the tops of the neighbor’s trees, Ed settled himself on my collarbone. The fears, the goldfinch perched there nestle quietly, strangle and rip at my neck, sometimes leaving blood trickling down to my ribs in rivulets, but I can’t deny that the flurry of kaleidoscopic feathers always captures my gaze, entrances me with wonder.
Personal Essay/Memoir: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, circa 2018 and 2019.
If I did not blot away that sacrilegious paragraph, would I have won a Gold Award for Honesty and Not-Trauma-But-Still-Kinda-Sucks, instead of the state Silver Key and Honorable Mention discarded at my feet? Who did I even strike it down for?
Impending deadline: The Wave Arts Magazine at Harvard, circa 2020.
One December midnight, I unpeel a lime-green sticky tab and press it onto the anthology page like a raindrop kiss. I ask another question.
“When all light finally forsakes a room, do we take the time to interrogate the dark, and to what end?”
— Practical Aim (Cyril Wong)
Emika is a writer who enjoys not-too-long poems, not-too-hot tea, and not-yet-crafted sentences she hopes to write someday. She studies at Harvard University.