Self-Reflection

This semester in Creative Writing class, I’ve been working on improving the depth of my work and the power of subtle details than can add to a character. In this semester, I’ve written half of a play, a memoir, two poems, half of a new draft on my longest work, and three short stories. I got to grapple a bit with play writing, a medium with which I am very unfamiliar, and really try to hammer out something presentable. My poems usually sprang from writer’s block as I attempted to force myself out of it, creating an often surprisingly bitter and deep snapshot. Once we moved away from playwriting and back to the more familiar and less-visual writing, I wrote a memoir and really got to explore my own voice, rather than that of my characters. But I think the work I’m most proud about is that I have started on a sixth draft of my long piece of writing, really getting the opportunity to sit and chisel away at it every morning.

As for my skills, I think by writing almost every day, they’ve improved substantially. My sentences are growing in complexity and I am able to wield them concisely and efficiently. This sort of combination of Creative Writing and my English class has definitely allowed me to emphasize and focus on what I can do as a writer, especially when the two collide and I can take what I learned in either class and apply it to the other to make my writing stronger overall. Also, my voice has become stronger, and my already conversational style has been able to switch between analyzing and creative writing, giving me much more versatility and relatability to my reader. As a person who dislikes setting concrete goals, I would love to finish my sixth draft and see where that takes me.

Catching a Rocket

I really hate just sitting on the couch. If I do it at all, it’s because my mother has ordered me to because I’m about to keel over with the flu, or I’m reading. I’ve been playing softball since I was twelve. But, I have severe nerve damage in my right shoulder ever since a girl collided with me when I was thirteen, so I’ve had to deal with chronic pain. The worst part about this nerve is that it lies right on a vein, so whenever I run around hard enough, it’ll throb against it until I can sit down and relax. This has been something I just had to deal with. About three weeks into the softball season during my freshman year at school, I found that my shoulder now ached continuously, and that simply sitting down for a few minutes did not abate it. My doctor told me that I could never play sports again.

Of course, I didn’t listen to her. I took three weeks off while I got acupuncture and rested. While I did that, I also made sure that I went to practice everyday after school, just to watch my team. Every time a ball was thrown, my whole body would tense up, and I would twitch my hands and whine to myself pathetically.

The day I came off of my injury, we had an away game. I had not played in any game since the season started. My coaches told me that I probably wouldn’t be playing in the game that day, but they wanted me on the bench, just in case. I boarded the bus grumpily, disappointed with myself for my crippled shoulder. But when we got to the field, our team was missing a few people, and we needed to fill positions. They put me right on second base. My coaches looked at me as if I were one of the sorriest sights they’d ever seen, and I agreed. I hadn’t been working out in weeks, I was rusty, and to put me so suddenly in a game like this seemed like a suicide mission.

The game started, and it seemed like the whole world got quiet. I shook where I stood, praying that our pitcher would strike this batter out. On the first pitch, the batter swung, and shot a rocket in the no-mans land between shortstop and second. Before I could register what happened, my glove hand shot out, and somehow, I had the ball. My whole team looked at me as if I were an MVP. No one could believe that I caught that ball. I was just as shocked as they were, not only for the catch, but also that my shoulder was okay. I didn’t feel that too-familiar debilitating stabbing that would go all the way down my arm. I thanked my acupuncturist and cursed my doctor under my breath.

But the game of softball does not allow for much celebration in between batters. The next girl stood up in the batters’ box, she was tall and her shoulders looked bigger than two of me stacked on top of each other. But I took a deep breath of the dusty air, popped my feet, and begged for the ball with my glove. Just as I began to bend my knees, I heard a loud thud, and time seemed to slow down. I had all the time in the world to get behind this large ball. It was spinning slowly towards me, but there was no way that I could catch it full-on, so I threw my left arm over to my right desperately. With a soft smacking sound, I had caught it. I dazedly retracted my arm to marvel at that neon yellow ball, not quite comprehending what I had done for several minutes. The crowd gasped and stared, then they began to clap. Even members of the other team were congratulating me.

After that second catch, my coaches called timeout. My coaches sized me up, both beaming. They moved me straight to third base, a position I had never played before, but they assured me that I would be fine. Ever since then, I’ve been their third baseman. We lost the game, ultimately. But walking back to our bus, everybody had a word to say about the small blonde kid who caught not one, but two, rockets.