My First Love

Creative Nonfiction by Chloe King

I cannot help but feel that my own creativity is slipping through the cracks of my shaking fingers. 

That’s not a good introductory sentence. It’s too long, no hook. No pizazz. None of that je-ne-sais-quoi English teachers drilled into my skull for four years straight. Just something sort of pathetic, a long-overused metaphor that I took from—what, an ABBA song? Are we serious? 

Bad handwriting. Left-handed touch typing, right-handed pointer finger. The need to write, physically, overcoming all other impulses until the thirst is quenched—not knowing what to write about. Too many dashes—that’s a marker of AI, apparently. Can anything satisfy, anymore?  

My first love, my mom’s old laptop, and sheets of 8.5 by 11-inch printer paper stapled together—three in a line. Bad handwriting, worse still, because all I want is my thoughts on paper, quickly, quickly, as quick as possible. Ink and pen and scribbled-out words. Nothing is quite right; always more to add. Essay page limits exceeded by a page and a half, at least, if not more—what is “fluff”? 

My first love. I spoke my stories before I had the breadth to write them on my own, before my small hands were able to pick up a pen and write fifty-some words a minute in handwriting teachers complained about. They were trivial things, and I once found them irrelevant, but now I think they may be the best prose I have ever produced, in my old babysitter’s handwriting. Oration, illustration, typography, handwriting. The beauty of language, of speaking, of writing, astounds me with a brilliance I have rarely seen in another human being. But never quite enough. My first love.  

I used to be creative. I could write and call something my own. But could I really? I feel stuck—in a mire of words, the morass of books read and movies watched, and stories heard. 

Entrenched. 

How can I know what is my own? I write and write and am never satisfied. I want—  

My first love. They say you never really move on from the first. All those that follow are compared to what once was—what could have been. 

I used to be creative. I wrote in these long sentences, ones that gave my English teachers headaches. My dad would tell me, when I was frustrated that he couldn’t understand one of my complex-compound-compound-complex-complex sentences, that I had the best understanding of grammar he’d ever seen, but sometimes I just wrote too much at once. Apparently, correctness doesn’t matter when people can’t understand you. 

I understand English. I know the language, and I own it, and it is mine. I love English, adore it really. I have never been drawn to anything like words. I know grammar, but I am not using it properly now. My essays are long, too long, so long that an old teacher gave up reading an essay rough draft over character foils in Romeo and Juliet because it was six pages longer than everyone else’s. English, are you my Romeo?  

My first love. In Kindergarten, I won honorable mention in a writing competition. I didn’t even write anything—I just illustrated an old storybook that already had illustrations. But being involved in it—in anything—was enough. I was reading Charlotte’s Web by the age of five. I made a diorama of the barn with the spider and the pig to present to my class. I got my name on a plaque in the front office in second grade because I got a million-some points in “Reading Counts”, and I was proud of that. I placed in the school spelling bee every year, won most of them. I remember all the words I ever lost the competition on—soldier in second grade, scythe in fourth, asphyxiate in fifth, and then again at the county-level, recapitulation. I will never spell those words incorrectly again.  

In eighth grade, I did 212 English lessons on “Study Island” in order to win a fifty-dollar Amazon gift card (and, in hindsight, probably also to brag). I know that number specifically because I took a picture of my name on the billboard, and I still have it saved on my phone. English awards for—count them, eighth, ninth, eleventh grades, double senior year: Honors English 8, Honors English I, AP English Language, AP English Literature, Dual Credit English. My first love. My only love, really, maybe, and where has it gone?  

I have read and reread a countless number of stories. Reading is everything to me—writing is…  

I searched the Internet, “What is more than everything?” And there is no answer. No word to describe my relationship with writing, because maybe it’s unrealistic—or maybe reading is not everything. But right now, it seems to be. Hundreds of pages of reading assignments a night in English, Sociology, Political Science, Law, Philosophy—it has consumed my being. People ask me how I’m finding college, and I say, “It’s not hard—just a lot of reading.”  

Reading has become my life. Reading will be my job. Reading is easy for me; I’ve done it for so long. It’s eyes scanning paper, or screen, and brain interpreting letters taught from birth, and sometimes discovering something amazing and profound, but most of the time not. Reading was a hobby, and now it is my existence. And I love to read, so this is fine most of the time. 

But sometimes, like now, I sit, and I read the work of another about a topic that might interest me or might not (I will read it all the same either way), and I mourn the loss of my first love. Sometimes, the urge becomes too strong, and I drop my responsibilities to my education and future for just a moment, much as I am doing now, to return to that one thing I can never seem to get over. My first love, my words—and maybe that’s arrogant, or maybe that’s life manifested. This, here, is proof of my existence. I am writing, and I am speaking, and my words will always exist, no matter where they end up. They are in the world now. My first love has given me life, and I will leave it again and come back again, like a vice I can never quite escape.  

I used to be creative. I wrote with no convictions other than the innocence of not knowing, and can I ever return to that? Can I ever write just as myself, when my identity lies in so much else? Reading has turned me into a conglomerate—an accumulation of everything I have ever learned. Is my voice my own?  

It’s me, but can anyone see? Can they hear me call out? For reprieve, or reassurance, for anything at all that might save me from this—  

Entrenchment. 

My first love—can you save me now? 

Here I am! 

Is that a good concluding sentence? 

Does it make sense? Is it compelling enough? Is there too much fluff? Can I be more concise? Am I using active voice? Are the grammar errors minimal? What about the spelling errors? Is my purpose evident? Did I use rhetorical devices effectively? What about rhetorical appeals? What message am I trying to convey? Has it met the word count? Is it formatted correctly? Will this get me full marks? Is it too insistent? Should I add a qualifier? Is there a variety of sentence structures? Am I clear? Am I missing anything? Am I— 

Am I too entrenched?