Personal Narrative-Ophelia

I’d be walking home when the outside rushes up to greet me with all the breathlessness of a Sunday afternoon. There is an unsaid magnificence in how the wind taps against my shoulders like a countermelody, fireflies haloing the honey of lantern light, the sharp glitter of rainfall. Kids bouncing soda cans along the sidewalks. Or sometimes I’d be idling along the small park pond, watching tiny iridescent fish wink across a dark map of water. Look! The burst of emerald here. That silvery-orange over there. And look! There, and there, and there.

My life can be compartmentalized into a series of four-walled boxes that I transition in and out of throughout the day. These closed areas are defined with inherent purpose. I would reside in cute downtown shops and bad Chinese restaurants and candy-colored homes that dot this quiet green suburbia. In the classrooms, I insatiably dive into the material and generate compelling discussions; due to the rigor and intensity of school, I am constantly accelerating forward. I walk inside with intentionality, fully aware of what to expect.

When transitioning between buildings, my mind isn’t busily analyzing the historical romanticization of Ophelia’s silence, nor is it barraged with every conceivable partial derivative in multivariate calculus. Instead, my thoughts quiet down. They turn retrospective. In this open expanse, the concepts I learn eventually process, marinate, reshape, and refine into tangible ideas. Connections form between disciplines as I ponder Prufrock on my way from the English building to the science atrium. I am outside the box; therefore, I