Beginning

You Begin
Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

I begin. I've never written a blog before - not consistently at least - so keeping one for a year seems ambitious and even a little bit foolish. I'm not sure if this blog will gather any kind of following - actually, I would be flattered if anyone besides my parents followed it regularly. A cursory introduction that will be no surprise to anyone who’s ever met me: five feet on a good day; caffeine addict; bibliophile. I spent my high school years as a complete overachiever, stuffing my days with AP classes, volunteering, Model UN, and various other academic pursuits. I’m also a writer (and a writing camp kid), and I’m looking forward to really focusing on this in the coming year.

I live with my parents and two resident animals (cats, Casper and Felix) in a suburb of Syracuse, New York. We’re known for our bad weather and our good basketball. Syracuse is made a lot more tolerable by the fact that I Have My License. I became slightly infamous my senior year for being the valedictorian with the car she could never park correctly. I like highways, adventures, and driving at night with pop music blaring. I knit a lot; I read a lot; I write not-often-enough. My passion is for non-fiction, both journalism and memoir-style narcissism. I’m a lifelong Girl Scout but I can’t start a fire.

Why Yale? That’s a question for a much, much longer post. Why a gap year? Briefly: I’m taking a year off before Yale because I’m young (I skipped first grade, so I would have been entering college at the tender age of seventeen - not that that’s particularly unusual) and restless. I’ve spent too long following rules and carefully crafting my life to meet the ultimate goal of an overachieving adolescence - college. Now I’ve made it - not that college admissions are anything but a game and, ultimately, a crapshoot. But I need to spend a year following my own rules and breaking them. I’m not (as far as I know) going to change the world or write a book. I’m not enrolled in any expensive gap year programs. I am taking a few classes at Syracuse, but that’s really just to give me something to do, and satisfy my parents’ secret longing that I go to Syracuse (they’re both alumni a few times over).

I’ll try to post daily but I’m not sure if that will happen. We’ll see. Please comment, talk at me or with me. I begin.

--Julia