I don’t remember the first time I wrote. I do remember, however, that I would always dream. I spent much of my time within my mind, my imagination creating and cultivating worlds where the impossible was reality. Imagination is a beautiful thing; free and unrestrained, capable of constructing worlds and designing stories. Words, too, are magical and enthralling. I must have known, from the first time that I attempted to form and intertwine words in a way that illustrated beauty, that I could not, and would never want to stop.
Words enabled me to manifest my mind into the physical world and share it with others. I began to write for myself, and I continued it for others. Seeing what my stories could do for its readers was the greatest thrill of all. Readers responded with their own accounts, and I was able to witness how my stories could bring people together and spread hope. My work influenced others in such wonderful ways, making me overjoyed that I decided to write and share my creations.
In my teenage years, my eyes opened a little wider. I never considered myself an ignorant person, but school taught me that the world isn’t always as pleasant as it seems. History has many profound lessons from which we—the ambassadors of the present—learn, with the intent to never repeat them again. But despite the purpose in teaching history so that we learn from it, the mistakes of the past continued to reach into the future. And so I picked up my pencil again, and I wrote.
Poetry, I learned, is an intricate art form of purposeful and careful word weaving. I began to write poems of emotions, narratives, and ideas. Something I discovered, through all of the poems I wrote and read, was that they were all stories. Some told tales of broken hearts, others of yearning. Many were of humanity’s grave past mistakes, and others were of errors that continue into the present. A few were of love and laughter, and some of family. Even if some of them were imaginary variations of history, they were all true.
I’ve learned a lot from literature. I’ve learned that no matter the type of literary art, or even humanities in general, everything created tells a story. Each of these anecdotes, from letters to poetry to books, was real, no matter if it was sorrowful, beautiful, or monstrous. Every pencil is a tool, and in the hand of a writer, it becomes a conductor of magic. Dreams are just as real as you and I, and the most exquisite thing you can do on this planet is to forge them into actuality. As you shape your life, with each second you move forward into the future, think about what story you want to create. Stories connect one idea to another person, and a person to another life. It’s an eternal and everlasting experience, and if you read something or write something, you contribute to an entire history full of ideas and sensations.
