At War With Time

Here's a poem I wrote based off of our blog assignment in which we were to write about a time we were at war with something.

My poem is about a time when I was in a pool at a daycare I went to. A kid thought it would be fun to push my head under water...and keep it there. One moment I was minding my own and then I found myself underwater not being able to breathe... I was at war with time.

At War with Time

Blackness engulfed me-It was too dark.
My four-year-old hands grasped to hold onto something-Nothing.
I was at war with time.

The pressure upon my head wouldn't budge.
My life falling deeper and deeper.
It was getting darker, and weaker.
My throat burning, craving the sweetness of life- I wouldn't give in.

Drawing blood, from which the pressure now dripped,
realeased me and I was free.

Resurfacing, I greedily took in as much air my lungs could hold.
A blinding light seeped it's way into my barely open eyes-I won.

Finding My Own Confidence

In my College Lit class, we had a discussion on times when one didn't fit in.
Something like that happended to me when I was in third grade.



It all started...when I got my hair cut.
My hair extended down to my lower back and was cut above the shoulders.
I had no idea my thick, Janis Joplin-like-hair would turn out to be one giant poofy disaster. Instead, I thought I would end up with sleek and straight hair.
After the horrifing trip to the hair salon, I became self conscious of my hair, and at school others took notice of it and would point at me and laugh.
I still had friends to go to, but it was the other kids words that hurt me.
Finally, I decided I'm not going to care what other people think, because that only brought me down even more. I became more self confident with myself. The other kids who used to stare and point and me finally stopped. I think they also realized that making fun of another was really childish.



I learned a lot from that whole experience. Although I wouldn't get my hair cut like that ever again. I'm really happy I did then. It taught me to not care what other people think of me because if I did, I would never be happy in life. I'm also happy because the hair that I cut was donated to Locks of Love. Locks of Love is a charity that makes wigs for people with cancer. Eventhough at the time I didn't like not fitting in, I got myself out of it. And in the end I became more confident.

You think you know, but you have no idea.

In my College Lit class there was a discussion about a short story titled, The Life You Save, May Be Your Own.
It's about a man who is disabled and walks into the lives of an older woman and her deaf 30-year-old daughter. The old man helps out the two woman, and he fixes their car that hasn't run in years. Then the man and daughter get married. After he marries her, he takes her to a restaurant and then leaves her there. While he's driving away he picks up a hitchhiker and then the hitchiker gets upset with the man and leaves. The man then continues to drive towards his destination.

So many different discussions were brought up about this short story, and what stuck out to me was a theme I got from it.

There's a part in the story in which the man talks about this doctor who cuts up a human heart, and no matter how he annalyzed it, he never truely knew the person.

In other words, You can analyze the heart of a person all you want, but you'll never truely know the person who carried the heart within themself.

Another thing I got from it was that people aren't always what they seem. The old man seemed kind at first, but there was something off about him. I came to see a side of him that was of mean spiritedness and that side of him was shown when he left the deaf daughter at the resteraunt, probably never to see her own mother again.

This Voice Within

"You don't realize what you have until it's gone..." This was one of the themes in a short story titled The Sutton Pie Safe. I myself have gone through losing something only then to realize that it ment more to me than I realized. What I lost was---my voice. Singing has been apart of my life since I was a young child. Wether I was singing disney songs at the age of seven to the movie Pochahontas, or when I was 16 and singing songs that I have wrote myself. I was always constantly singing. I sang so much that I overstressed my vocal cords and I got what ever singer's worst nightmare is--vocal nodules. Vocal nodules are a build up of tissue on the vocal cords making it hard for one person to sing. One can get it by smoking, screaming, talking too loudly...or overusing the voice. However,
I was very very lucky in the sense that mine were so acute, that if I didn't sing for awhile I would be able to heal it, instead of having to undergo surgery to be rid of them.
For 6 months I couldn't sing, that was a nightmare I lived with. But since it's been roughly around two years since my incident. I've learned how to take care of my voice. I now fully appreciate what I have, and I'm not going to let it get taken away from me again. Finally I can now bring forth This Voice, My Voice Within.