Paper Cut on My Heart
Its four a.m. and there are bodies on the couches. Limbs splayed, skin sallow, eyes glassy. These once healthy and robust young intellectuals reduced to mindless lumps. Where before they were sharp and witty, now their words have since ceased to claim coherency. The furious clicking of keys has trickled down almost to a halt. The buzz of the lights overhead mixes with the soft humming of the overworked laptops, but the true soundtrack is the one kept by the earbuds played overloud into the ears of the exhausted teens, and the each ones melody overlaps to bounce around the white walls. Every so often a words will force their way past lethargic lips: “ What's another word for maim?, “Show me your Werebear stare!”. It’s par for the course.
The Alpha Writing Workshop for young writers is the most astounding expression of where a quirky, sarcastic, bibliophile can find a place to call home for the first time in their life, and a family who understands their nerd jokes. And when it was time to say goodbye, it also gave me my first taste of heart-break. But I, and the other Alphans didn’t mind in the long run, no matter how long we made the shuttle driver at the hotel wait as we sobbed like little girls all over each other. We started out as an assortment of twenty teens with personalities that set us apart as different back home, but by the middle, by the end, although we joking called ourselves a “hive-mind”, we were a family.
I arrived at the Pittsburg airport scared out of my ever-loving mind. Would my writing skills be on par with everyone else's? Would I fit in? Please don’t let me be the only girl with big breasts! The Alphans didn’t help much. I had no idea why everyone seemed so obsessed with cumquats and the color of space cacti. The hour long car ride to the University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus from the airport was awkward, stuttering, and one of the best of my life. Five of us crammed into Diane's car. Diane, a woman helping with Alpha, we would come to realize, wanted us all to pair off and have little writing babies. We then proceeded to verbally spar, poke, prod, juggle, joke, and start the hive mind that I will forever remember as Alpha. As the strange new sight of trees passed in blurs passed my window, I looked into the back seat and smiled and Jasmine, my now best friend, and we simultaneously finished the punch line of a joke. I was a thousand miles away, and my heart way heavy and warm, as I had come home.
The room that pulls my heart strings the most as I look back on my time at Alpha only came to prominence because we all had a rather bad habit not working. Alpha had a companionable air of procrastination; we all watched with an air of almost childlike curious amusement as the deadline for our stories screamed up at us. But in the end we decided that getting to know each other through games of ultimate Frisbee and mafia was more important. We sat in the common room, our laptops open to our stories, and instead of typing, talked about Confucius being a slut, Necronauts, and how our stories tasted like ass. The common room contained two couches, miscellaneous chairs, the rejection binder, books, magazines, but mostly our hopes and dreams. Now it might seem odd that I have waited this long before explaining that the common room is in fact where my mind wanders during the quiet moments of the day, and a lump forms in my throat when I remember it, but I'm writing this thing. To explain, Alpha was not simply place or a camp. It was life, it was family, it was my world tiling on its axis in the most insanely heartbreakingly perfectly beautiful way. It was important to set this up.
The common room was actually the area between a set of suits on the bottom level of the dorm we had invaded. It was simply the white brick and matching paint seen in all dorm I suppose, nothing special. We simply crammed as much seating space into them as possible; those plain brown couches must have had their capacity tested more times than I can count. But obviously it wasn't the décor that carved a place for this room in my heart. More nerd jokes were told here than within the halls of NASA. And really, who could forget that?
I wish I could write some moving story about how I was just sitting on a couch, reveling in the presence of other book snobs, and then it just hit me like a divine spark that I would always remember that room. But I can't. All I can do piece together fragments of memories, and morph them into a feeling. I do remember conversations about the tech of the Watchmen comic, and psych of Batman. I remember laughing at DBK because he burned the ramen noodles. I remember staggering down the stairs with Jasmine and Ailena at my heels, the scent of teatree oil in my nose and the feel of almost dry henna on my chest. But for all the pictures and videos in my head, the most I can give you is a feeling. The feeling of warmth, of sadness, of friendship, all wrapped up in my chest as I look back and remember that white walled room and those ugly couches. It lies there waiting for a slip of the tongue, a word only I associate with that white room. It waits for that moment late at night when my fingers brush over the worn binding of a book, feeling the crinkled paper. But I wait too.
The Alpha Writing Workshop for young writers is the most astounding expression of where a quirky, sarcastic, bibliophile can find a place to call home for the first time in their life, and a family who understands their nerd jokes. And when it was time to say goodbye, it also gave me my first taste of heart-break. But I, and the other Alphans didn’t mind in the long run, no matter how long we made the shuttle driver at the hotel wait as we sobbed like little girls all over each other. We started out as an assortment of twenty teens with personalities that set us apart as different back home, but by the middle, by the end, although we joking called ourselves a “hive-mind”, we were a family.
I arrived at the Pittsburg airport scared out of my ever-loving mind. Would my writing skills be on par with everyone else's? Would I fit in? Please don’t let me be the only girl with big breasts! The Alphans didn’t help much. I had no idea why everyone seemed so obsessed with cumquats and the color of space cacti. The hour long car ride to the University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus from the airport was awkward, stuttering, and one of the best of my life. Five of us crammed into Diane's car. Diane, a woman helping with Alpha, we would come to realize, wanted us all to pair off and have little writing babies. We then proceeded to verbally spar, poke, prod, juggle, joke, and start the hive mind that I will forever remember as Alpha. As the strange new sight of trees passed in blurs passed my window, I looked into the back seat and smiled and Jasmine, my now best friend, and we simultaneously finished the punch line of a joke. I was a thousand miles away, and my heart way heavy and warm, as I had come home.
The room that pulls my heart strings the most as I look back on my time at Alpha only came to prominence because we all had a rather bad habit not working. Alpha had a companionable air of procrastination; we all watched with an air of almost childlike curious amusement as the deadline for our stories screamed up at us. But in the end we decided that getting to know each other through games of ultimate Frisbee and mafia was more important. We sat in the common room, our laptops open to our stories, and instead of typing, talked about Confucius being a slut, Necronauts, and how our stories tasted like ass. The common room contained two couches, miscellaneous chairs, the rejection binder, books, magazines, but mostly our hopes and dreams. Now it might seem odd that I have waited this long before explaining that the common room is in fact where my mind wanders during the quiet moments of the day, and a lump forms in my throat when I remember it, but I'm writing this thing. To explain, Alpha was not simply place or a camp. It was life, it was family, it was my world tiling on its axis in the most insanely heartbreakingly perfectly beautiful way. It was important to set this up.
The common room was actually the area between a set of suits on the bottom level of the dorm we had invaded. It was simply the white brick and matching paint seen in all dorm I suppose, nothing special. We simply crammed as much seating space into them as possible; those plain brown couches must have had their capacity tested more times than I can count. But obviously it wasn't the décor that carved a place for this room in my heart. More nerd jokes were told here than within the halls of NASA. And really, who could forget that?
I wish I could write some moving story about how I was just sitting on a couch, reveling in the presence of other book snobs, and then it just hit me like a divine spark that I would always remember that room. But I can't. All I can do piece together fragments of memories, and morph them into a feeling. I do remember conversations about the tech of the Watchmen comic, and psych of Batman. I remember laughing at DBK because he burned the ramen noodles. I remember staggering down the stairs with Jasmine and Ailena at my heels, the scent of teatree oil in my nose and the feel of almost dry henna on my chest. But for all the pictures and videos in my head, the most I can give you is a feeling. The feeling of warmth, of sadness, of friendship, all wrapped up in my chest as I look back and remember that white walled room and those ugly couches. It lies there waiting for a slip of the tongue, a word only I associate with that white room. It waits for that moment late at night when my fingers brush over the worn binding of a book, feeling the crinkled paper. But I wait too.
