Literacy Autobiography

When I was four my friend and I covered the walls of her sister’s bedroom with lipstick. I remember looking up at the blank wall and the most logical thing seemed to be to fill with something – anything. I picked up the lipstick from the vanity and galloped around the room, letting the lipstick slash the wall. I was, at that moment, exhilarated with the thought of creating something, of expressing something. I wasn’t old enough to write – I didn’t understand letters or words, but I understood that that red lipstick was saying everything I wanted to say to the wall. But it wasn’t art that I was creating – it was emotion.

Years later, I still had that same desire to fill space with emotion. It didn’t matter what kind of space – the surface of a desk, the margins of newspapers and lined paper were all the same to me. They could hold beauty, they could morph into art. At first, I doodled, but it wasn’t enough. Doodles were flat and dull, and I was insatiable. The doodles just sat on the page saying nothing, showing nothing; I needed the page to show everything. I began to scribble down song lyrics that I felt connected to. Just the act of writing words was therapeutic and intimate - the soft curve of a lowercase a, the slight tilt of an off kilter t. While my eating disorder wreaked havoc on my life, I found comfort in the contrast of ink on paper and the shape of the words. It didn’t matter at first what the words said – I just loved the way they looked in the margins of my notes, or secretly tucked away on a folded piece of paper in the back of a book.

My favorite line to fill the margins of my notes was this: “and you're measuring your minutes by a clock that's blinking eights / this is incredible, starving, insatiable.” I didn’t love that line because of what it meant, or the way the words sounded. I loved the line because of the slender ovals of the number 8. I loved the line because the last three words stacked perfectly on top of one another to create a lovely shape.

I met Caroline, a senior, my freshman year in high school. She was an artist, and a writer, and sometimes she wore pencils through the holes in her ears. Two days after I met her she wrote me a note.

“I think you’re my Claire,” it said.

I pulled out my phone and sent her a text. “Claire?”

“You’ll see.”

She slipped the book Violet and Claire by Francesca Lia Block to me across the table at lunch that day. During biology, I opened the book to a page Caroline had dog-eared with an underlined passage:

"At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl."

That night, I devoured Violet and Claire. It was my story; it was her story. It was everyone’s story.

Every line that Francesca wrote moved me. As Dvořák’s New World Symphony moved musicians, every line that Francesca wrote moved me. There were times when I would momentarily stop breathing at the splendor of her language. I craved to emulate her style and choice of words. To me, she was a writer, a perfect storyteller. I found myself in all her characters.

I began to carry a black marble composition book with me everywhere. It was more than a journal – it housed my favorite words, quotes I loved, lines that spoke to me. Opening up my book was like meeting up with a familiar friend. No matter what page the book fell open to, I knew exactly what was there; I memorized each page by heart. Not just the prose – I memorized the slight indentations where I’d pressed the pencil harder, the folds of the page, the way the titles looked above the entries. It was a love affair, and I’d memorized its face.

The book contained the first piece of creative writing that I internalized and put my own vitality into. I remember when I finished the piece; I was emotionally drained yet satisfied. It had no title – I called it “Portrait of a Girl #1.” It was a sketch of a girl who imagined she had long, perfect hair and could fly. From this piece came a series of sketches, all of the same girl. Caroline and I would sit at our lunch table and critique the portraits, dissecting the dialogue and tasting each word on our tongues. One day Caroline said to me, “This portrait reminds me of a book by Francesca.” That’s the only piece of writing I held onto when Caroline died later that year.