Bronze - College Essay

Instructions

There once was a little girl who learned to write. She prided herself in the art, for it was rather uncommon at that age, but when antagonists began to switch from evil witches in Fairyland to adverse siblings in “the Real World,” another pen crossed her page. To the untrained eye, it was identical to her own: sturdy and metallic with a fine tip. But she saw it. She saw that hers was a bronze to the copy’s gold, that her ink flowed in dashes instead of long lines. She held a prize, but not her twin’s perfection. Jealously twisted her mind, and she set out with one goal: to become the better writer. It was a failed journey from the start. Talent is innate, and, at an age when skills had not yet been developed, she was unable to write as eloquently as her adversary. And so, to not lose, she quit. She dropped her shiny pen into the trash alongside the remains of ink-blotted paper. An unburdened year blossomed in the wake of her choice, traversed with apathy for the art of the written word. She built her bulwark by mouse (for the Apple pencil was too familiar of a tool), drawing a digital border between her and the world—one that remained uncrossed until an eighth-grade creative writing class came knocking. She accepted the dull No. 2 pencil passed her way, maintaining that she could indeed fulfill this mandatory task, only for the lead to snap just as swiftly beneath her hand as it did beneath the fingers of those ignorant to wordcraft. Appalled, she tried again, but to no avail. The lead was too brittle, too stubborn. Seeds of regret blew through the cracks in her walls, and, watered by the tears of her failure, they began to take root. She sharpened the pencil once more. She wrote until the pencil ran out of graphite. The seeds sprouted. She traded the stump of wood for a mechanical one of its kind. Vines crawled over her domain. The lead was replaceable, and so she wrote draft after draft, composing any and every short story that came to mind. She continued until the pencil itself could no longer suit her needs. Flower buds formed. Scrounging through the trash, she found her old pen. Dust caked its metallic surface and dried ink clogged its fine tip. She began to wipe the grime away as the flowers bloomed. By the time she finished and my hands closed over a tool I could finally wield, the walls stood no longer. Freedom was on my lips when I whispered the first few lines of the novel I’d work on for years to come. And, oh, did I write. Tales of tragedy and triumph poured onto blank pages; stories of soulmates and siblings, desperation and deception, pain and power, chosen ones and one-last-chances. Ink stained my white paper, etching poetry into my bones. As I pulled back my pen to compose another line, that copy found its way back. My twin drew her own lines above mine, that gold flashing in my eyes. But, at that moment, I didn’t care, because my favorite color was bronze.