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So I went to a free Gotham writing class today, and it happened to focus on memoir writing, which I didn’t know. And then I realized that all I do with this blog, ever, is write a disjointed form of memoir. So I thought I’d type up two of the assignments that we were given. The first assignment was to write our life stories in five sentences. Here’s mine, and I think it is probably the clearest indicator of the melancholy nature of much of my writing.
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Mariam Bazeed did not know how she would die, but suspected it might be alone. She’d left her family, and country, and friends years before, and moved across an ocean and a continent. Before that, she’d lived in Cairo, a city she had neither grown up in, nor one she’d gone on to know intimately. Before that, she’d grown up in Kuwait. Before that, she’d been born to aging parents, who died before she’d had the luxury, as most children do, of leaving them.
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A veritable ray of sunshine, aren’t I? What the hell is wrong with me? Anyway, the second assignment is not as self-pitying. In it, we are asked to look back upon a romantic moment from childhood. Here’s mine.
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We all trooped down to the gym, shoes scuffing against the cement in our excitement to be down there. Miss Kay was taking us down so we could learn the Lambada, and this was so beyond the ordinariness of our school days that I imagined you could hear my heart race from many paces away.
After showing us the steps, Miss Kay began to pair us off into the dancing duets we’d be assigned from that moment forward. I was ungainly and graceless, far from lithe. I worried that I would embarrass myself with a more capable partner.
I was paired with Moustafa, and blinked in surprise when Miss Kay said his name. He and Sheikha usually did everything together. I blushed. I’d been eyeing him for the entire school year. But he had eyes only for her, and never sought my own gaze.
We danced. And though I couldn’t tell for sure, it seemed as if divine providence had lent me a momentary grace.
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What I did not write in class was the ending to that story. Which is that, Moustafa, finding the bit when he has to dip me funnier than his seven-year-old sensibilities were at the time able to handle, lets out a big, wheezy laugh. He expels air through his nose at a velocity sufficient in power to dislodge a gooey bit of snot from inside his nose. It sails through the air between us, landing on my cheek, gummy side first, and sticks fast.
The End
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Mariam Bazeed did not know how she would die, but suspected it might be alone. She’d left her family, and country, and friends years before, and moved across an ocean and a continent. Before that, she’d lived in Cairo, a city she had neither grown up in, nor one she’d gone on to know intimately. Before that, she’d grown up in Kuwait. Before that, she’d been born to aging parents, who died before she’d had the luxury, as most children do, of leaving them.
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A veritable ray of sunshine, aren’t I? What the hell is wrong with me? Anyway, the second assignment is not as self-pitying. In it, we are asked to look back upon a romantic moment from childhood. Here’s mine.
-------------------------
We all trooped down to the gym, shoes scuffing against the cement in our excitement to be down there. Miss Kay was taking us down so we could learn the Lambada, and this was so beyond the ordinariness of our school days that I imagined you could hear my heart race from many paces away.
After showing us the steps, Miss Kay began to pair us off into the dancing duets we’d be assigned from that moment forward. I was ungainly and graceless, far from lithe. I worried that I would embarrass myself with a more capable partner.
I was paired with Moustafa, and blinked in surprise when Miss Kay said his name. He and Sheikha usually did everything together. I blushed. I’d been eyeing him for the entire school year. But he had eyes only for her, and never sought my own gaze.
We danced. And though I couldn’t tell for sure, it seemed as if divine providence had lent me a momentary grace.
-------------------------
What I did not write in class was the ending to that story. Which is that, Moustafa, finding the bit when he has to dip me funnier than his seven-year-old sensibilities were at the time able to handle, lets out a big, wheezy laugh. He expels air through his nose at a velocity sufficient in power to dislodge a gooey bit of snot from inside his nose. It sails through the air between us, landing on my cheek, gummy side first, and sticks fast.
The End
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