Writing Samples
Lost Girl
She’s gone. Everyone is looking for her, including me. The last time I saw her, she was sprinting at full tilt through the darkness, trying to escape the clutches of her giggling friends behind her. Then… she fell.
I don’t remember her falling. I don’t remember the gaping fear in the pit of her chest as she plummeted towards the concrete, too surprised to even get her hands between her temple and the rock below. I don’t remember her friends crowding around her, if they were crying or quiet. I don’t remember the screaming sirens barreling down the road or the voices in the hospital corridor.
Truthfully, I don’t care to remember any of those things. But I wish I knew when I lost her, when the bright eyed straight-A student who never lost and never cried left this body.
They all want her back. I can tell they do. My parents keep telling me that she’ll come back. But what if she doesn’t? What if everything that was—everything that I was—is gone forever? I knew myself then, and I knew I could count on myself to figure it out, to get past this challenge and move on to the next. But I’m not me anymore, and I truthfully don’t know if I’ll figure out how to find the next challenge, let alone conquer it.
Almost as bad as the doubt is the loneliness. After one week of sideways looks, I’ve learned to stop talking. The therapists pat me on the hand and say try again. My friends look at me like they can’t believe how stupid I’m talking. So I’ve stopped talking. I spend my time now in my mind, thinking mostly about how to find that lost girl again. The girl who can talk right and walk right and think right.
I imagine what it would be like to be the lost girl, just waiting in a cage in a cold room for someone to come and rescue you. Certain that all hope is lost when a lone hero emerges from the emptiness to find you. Reader, I hope that someone finds her someday, because I never have. And I hope they take her someplace warm and happy.
It’s funny to think that this last stretch of the imagination was the key. Thinking about the lost girl, I somehow realized that I was one. Not the same one, per se. But still one worth finding, worth keeping, worth knowing. It’s no wonder to think that every one of my stories follows the footsteps of the lost girl that somehow figures out how to find herself.
Cricket Song
Susanna told me once that she loved the sound of crickets. She said it made her feel safe. She talked to the crickets often, offering her voice to the gentle symphony of wings floating above the hum of the night. And when the music rose in crescendo, Susanna swore the crickets were talking back to her.
For weeks, I watched her at that window, peering out upon an orchestra that she couldn’t see. And when the cough attacked her throat, Susanna’s symphony would stop, as if holding its breath in anticipation of the rekindling of her voice. But even when her melody returned, we all knew it was only a matter of time. And when the doctor said the word hospital, Susanna choked against a cacophony of tears, closing her eyes and reaching towards her friends in the darkness as adult arms guided her away.
From that moment forward, the night outside Susanna’s room remained as silent as the darkness, unbroken by the joyous response of cricket wings to their conductor. Peering out from Susanna’s window, her father often wondered what had happened to his little girl’s symphony, and his tears thundered down as he pleaded for the voices that had once kept his daughter strong. But no one answered him. The crickets were gone.
The truth is, we had somewhere more important to be. Because 500 miles away, a little girl was peering out of her hospital room window. She didn’t have the voice to cry out to us, but we heard her. And one by one, we unleashed our wings to fight the silence, raising our tiny voices in crescendo to produce the symphony inspired by our tiny conductor. She heard us, I knew, and this time, Susanna’s beaming smile was the melody that called us to play louder, longer, stronger. And we did.
For her, we did.
