The Shell of Despair

Essay #1
The Shell of Despair
When I was an adolescent, perhaps four or five years of age, I came face to face with despair. At the time, I did not know this would be the closest encounter I would have with it, but I did know I was meeting it. I had a friend from preschool who was my best friend. She lived in my neighborhood and we would always play together. Then one day she called me and I was expecting a happy voice if I anted to come over. Instead I heard a confused, puzzle voice coming through the phone. To quote her verbatim, she said, “Andrew, I think my cousin is dead. My parents said he committed suicide.” Neither of us knew what that meant, nor was it explained to us. So I went over her house and her father asked me if I wanted to go with them. I could tell he was very sad because usually he was an absolute lunatic…the good kind. So I went with them, knowing I could offer some consolation in the form of happiness. We went to the house, and in the car ride, we learned the definition of suicide. The act of killing yourself defines suicide. So, we drove silently and glumly to the house. Instantly, I saw bright colors, almost like someone dropped neon paint everywhere. Grass as green as a granny smith apple lay in front of me, opening up to a large hill. At the peak of the hill, a sunflower colored house perched, almost like a yellow canary perches on a branch. The walkway, of course, was a bright red, almost hot pink. A swing set stood in the backyard with blue swings. There in the back, hanging from a tree, was an unused climbing rope. I saw my friend’s dad point to the rope and the mother gasped, tears flew down her cheeks. It was an odd state for me to be in, especially as a young child. I walked into the bright house ...

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...han the north. Despair is shown throughout the poem in both the morbid sense of the poem, and also the deeper meaning of the poem. The last two lines capture this perfectly. For if “Love is a naked shadow on a gnarled and naked tree”, then love must be lost when the soul of a human is lost.
In both the painting and the poem, a human soul is expressed to be lost through a lynching. Through their works, both artists tell a tale of a lynching and how it had broken the heart of “the people who were reluctant to leave”. It also showed how through the loss of a loved one, abandonment was a mutual feeling felt, for none can qualm the ache of despair. Together, in both the poem and the painting, despair was shown as a cold soul, clinging on to all that let it in. For without the shell of an empty human being, despair could not strut around, pretending to be a human being.