Empoword

Part One: Description, Narration, and Reflection 122 things I know he thought about. But he never mentioned them. He never complained. He never talked about the pain he was in, even though I know now it was constant. I guess at some point he became like the fish that doesn’t know it’s in water. That, or he just made his peace with it somehow. It took me a long time to find my own peace in his situation. Our situation. I was angry for myself and my family, but mostly I was angry for him. I was pissed that he had to spend the last twenty something years of his life in that prison he called a body. Eventually though, that anger gave way to other feelings. Gratitude, mostly. I don’t think that my dad could have lived a hundred healthy years and taught me the same lessons that I learned from watching him suffer. He taught me about personal sacrifice, the brevity of life, how it can be both a blessing and a curse. All kids are egocentric (I know I definitely was), but he was the first one to make me think outside of myself, without having to ask me to do it. He taught me what compassion and patience looked like. He taught me to slow down. Untitled 50 The sky was white, a blank canvas, when I became the middle school’s biggest and most feared bully. The sky was white and my hands were stained red with blood— specifically a boy named Garrett’s blood. I was 12 years old, smaller than average with clothes-hanger collar bones but on that day I was the heavyweight champion. It wasn’t as if I’d just snapped out of the blue; it wasn’t as if he were innocent. He had just been the only one within arms-length at the time when my heart beat so loudly in my ears, a rhythm I matched with my fists. I was dragged off of him minutes later by stunned Teacher Takeaways “This essay is commendable for its deft narration — replete with a balanced use of specific descriptions and general exposition. However, the mixture of simple past tense with simple future tense (used here to indicate the future in the past) situates both the reader and the narrator primarily in the past. This means that we really don't get to the simple present tense (i.e. across the diegetic gap) until the final two paragraphs of the essay. That said, the narrator’s past reflections are integrated often throughout the essay, making it more an example of ‘weaving’ than of ‘wrap-up.’” – Professor Fiscaletti