Can you please read the first half of my common app essay?
↑ Speed straight ahead into the dining room abyss of colliding mini-cars.
↰ Take the next left onto the kitchen-floor highway and barge through the Barbie-doll pedestrians.
↑ Continue on the ball-infested wet bar and kamikaze-crash into the community of Build-a-Bears.
↰ After causing the accident, head west onto the Lego-swamped living room, ensuring all the Slinkys, Scrabble Letters, and Rock’ Em Sock’ Em Robots are scattered into oblivion.
↱ Your destination will be on the right.
The rambunctious directions of a hyperactive kid were more than perplexing from an 8-year-old me’s eyes. What my mom declared as a nonchalant evening playdate down-spiraled into a cataclysmic event of chaos. Following the lengthening trail of demolished Ninjago knick-knacks, Lincoln-Log contraptions, and Lightning McQueen figurines, I witnessed my companion rampage through the populous cities of desecrated Toysaurus products. “Balance was lacking”, he proclaimed, as if we were children of Thanos. And the only way to tip the pendulum back to equilibrium -thank you very much- was to smithereen everything in sight.
Truth be told... I was mesmerized by the mayhem. Within the overlapping layers of our Godzillian demolition, I found a safe haven of unlimited expression, a place that withdrew the monotonous principles of step-by-step precision found in the scrupulously folded instructions of every toy package. The splintering sounds of teeth-marred plastic grinding against bare feet. The tantalizing excitement of dissecting wheels from automated mini-cars, arms from lego-men, wings from airplanes. The inexhaustible delight of binding and intertwining these mismatched parts into cohesive, operational structures with the satiating shrill of a “click”. Yes- this process was strange, even bizarre one would say. But it was a valiant attempt to conjoin my fractured, restrained wisps of thought into cascading streams of vocalized sentences.
However- the brittleness of these sentences was real. Too real. Too vulnerable to endure the daunting journey of my vocal cords without corroding. Too frail to remain intact upon the stress-induced stutters of a mouth. Too indecisive, that even the slightest hints of uncertainty provoked silence to smell blood, reemerge, and reconquer. Silence, I surrendered to again and again, with each carefully articulated phrase staggering and collapsing over the other. When the dust settled and the silence insinuated, the sole survivor amidst the rubbled aftermath was one hesitantly-muttered word.
“Hey whatcha wanna do next?”
“Ok”
“You wanna play this?”
“Ok”
“Can you say anything else?”
“Okay”