Hello, my name is Alex, age 13, and this is my entry into the National Writing Contest. As this is the regional draw, you can sure bet that I'm happy to be here. Ha. I'm in seventh grade. My favorite writers are Frank Herbert and Shakespeare and short story writers.
Uh... how are you all doing, today? Glad to see you gathered? Now, without further hesitations I will commemorate my reading of the essay. I mean commence. Begin.
It's October, but I already have a New Year's Resolution for 2003, and I figure I'll start today. In life, as in art, what we do in life echoes through eternity, despite the fact that we really have no importance to the universe. I contemn this, because I would like it better if we could simply co-exist together, our deeds bouncing harmlessly off each other, but I can't change the fact that this is how it is. Those of you who are older know what I'm talking about. You've done things you can never take back, said things that you'll always regret. And you know that the things you've done matter, and that the things we younger people do matter, and you know that we don't know yet, that we have yet to see a truly unrelentable moment in our lives. I'm speaking abstractly because I haven't felt regret on that sort of level. I can take back almost everything. I can redeem almost everything. Because there's time.
And so it is with the vast most of us young people. 13 is too young to know regret, mostly because we are too young to control anything around us, much less understand the causality of our existences, the processes that, like stories, have a beginning, middle, and end: the chains of reasoning and process that bind us together. I know these processes are real, but they're inaccessible to me. Life seems like one of those Rube Goldberg machines, and I just try to trust what my mom tells me, and so I go to high school and then to college and we'll see what I can make of my intelligence. But I can't see high school. I can't see college. I just see orchestra seventh period and homeroom eighth. I don't really see tomorrow. My biggest life goal right now is to play Eternal Darkness when it comes out. Kidding aside, it looks really cool.
But deep down I know that the world is bigger. After 9/11, like many of you, I've been glued to the TV, mesmerized by the news. I see our president wants himself a war. I see that we have been attacked and must attack. I see a world of people I feel I'll never identify with. I see a world of evil, not just outside our borders but in our borders, and that sometimes evil is truly just well-meaning authoritarianism and war-mongering. I know the world is bigger and constantly flex my biggest muscle - my brain, that is - in hopeful service against this evil. And with writing and with speeches, I feel I can hope to conquer it. I don't have regrets yet, because I didn't make the world, and I don't know what making the world even means. 13 is too young to know regret. But more and more I have the feeling that I will have regret.
My father died last year, and then, a few months later, our nation was attacked in 9/11. I found solace only in my father's music, a new sense of self that rose from the ashes, a renewed purpose in politics, and by diving into composing music of my own. My mother doesn't want me to tell you this, but she's doing well for herself. She quit her desk job and is starting a new career in culinary school, which means she's learning to be a professional chef. My brother is 9 now, and he's a sponge for information, and not much else. I see him watch TV all day and I wonder how he takes it all in. I know we'll find happiness but every time I open the door and see the stairway up for my parents, and the stairway down for me and my brother, I look up and think of my dad. I can't hear the word "father" in music without becoming emotional, and when I go upstairs to the piano and the kitchen it's always sadly lit with fluorescent sickening light and my stomach hurts and I put my elbows on the table and go to sleep after eating, usually until 11 at night, and I stay up all night after that. It's my own world when I'm up and I just try not to disturb anyone. I watch shows about politics, but I like comedy because it makes me think, and just as important, calls attention to the fact that you can't think too hard, because the world is truly a very funny place, and getting too firm a grasp on it would probably drive you insane.
I'm too young to know regret, but I wish I could have stopped my father from dying of heart disease. I wish I could have stopped the terrorists of Al-Qaeda from destroying our peace of mind and killing so many innocents. I wish I could have stopped all the mistakes that I've made. I wish I would have turned that fable in on time. I wish I would have been clearer to my friends when there was conflict. I wish I would have learned algebra in one year instead of two. I wish I hadn't disappointed my teacher by forgetting my laptop in the hall. I wish I'd been more supportive of my mom when she started cooking school. It's not cute to deal with tragedy, because in the final sense, all our lives are always before and after innumerable tragedies. No, to deal with tragedy by changing course is not cute: It's our essential problem in life.
And yet, I know that all these things are past, though they keep me up at night, and most of them I had to go through in order to learn how to deal with them. But the future is here and we will have challenges. And with those challenges will come regrets. We will make mistakes again and again in 2003, over and over, and we will lose sleep about them in 2004 while we're making still more mistakes.
But for once, I'm a little bit more well-placed in this world, and for once, I know a little bit of truth and order in this year of chaos and lies. I know that for all our mistakes and regrets, we can live, we can live our lives in 2003 so that we have no regrets in 2004. And even though we know we will fail, we will try, and we - for our trials - will be further consummated until that day, some day far hence, when we truly have nothing to regret. Let's get started. That's my resolution.
Thank you.
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