Ten Talents: Beginnings
The first clue came during my elementary school years. My first relevant memory. Not a moving one, but a mental photograph, which sees me standing in the kitchen of our tiny apartment in Brooklyn. The TV is on in the living room behind me. If I turn around, I’ll see my Tio Julio sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, a Budweiser in his hand. In time he’ll become the only person I’ll ever know to drink Budweiser. The red and white design of those particular beer cans and my uncle are synonymous in my mind.
He’s dead now. Gone before his time to complications with COVID. I can’t say how grateful I am that he makes up a peripheral part of this flashbulb memory, for undergirding my time in New York like support beams is his sacrifice which made it possible. Possible for the little boy standing at the kitchen table that night, stapling together a small stack of printer paper. My first attempt at making a book. Though plans never saw anything made beyond the first page, this was the earliest sign of a budding dream to come.
The next clue came in the sixth grade when I was paired with a friend for an assignment to create a comic strip. I quickly took charge and put together a plot now forgotten to memory. I instructed my friend to cut sheets of paper into squares onto which we’d draw the scenes, which we’d then staple together to form a small booklet. Apart from the enthusiasm with which I approached the assignment—and my now twice-shown desire to create narrative—this memory stands out as the earliest instance of me showing a particular interest in verse. In one of the scenes, I wrote a rhyming couplet to put on the lips of one of the characters.
Except for small isolated blips on a radar, the next clue came in a writing class at Forsyth Technical Community College. I would’ve been about seventeen. Students were to write a creative nonfiction story about a personal experience. The incident I chose to write about was the best example I knew of the butterfly effect, and I titled it Smoking Lies—a pun playing on a detail in the story. I read it before the class and received an A.
Up until this point I never made anything of these anecdotes because they weren’t anecdotes yet. They were only instances, too random and sporadic to mean anything. I had no inkling that I enjoyed writing or telling stories. That passion would remain tucked under the covers of my subconscious as I entered Bible college at the age of nineteen. This is where things would begin to stir.
It was in Bible college that I discovered my love to study, and due to all of the end-of-term papers (my professors loved papers), it wasn’t long before I realized I was pretty good at writing them. Unlike many of my classmates, I could put off multiple papers—each of them ten to twelve pages long—to the night of and still manage A’s. Aside from the comments left at the top of my graded papers, I made note of being pulled aside by one of my professors one day. I was interning in the Audio/Video department, and my end-of-term project was to help write, shoot, and edit a promotional video for the college. My professor knew about the project and the role I played. After handing me my graded paper, I’ll never forget the inflection in his voice when he said, why aren’t you on the script team?
Eventually, I met another student who became a good friend—and a catalyst. Ed enjoyed writing as a hobby, and he’d do this thing where he’d post a random stock image to Instagram and add a block of prose in the caption. The posts were thought-provoking and well written. He told me a time or two to join him in writing these abstract pieces of prose, but I never did. Then, one day, he sent me a stock image and asked me to collaborate with him. I agreed, wrote my piece, and sent it to him—and the seal was broken.
If I’d discovered that I had a knack to write papers before, this is when I discovered that I could also write for personal enjoyment. But though the seal was broken indeed, it was only a small stream that got through. For the next two years, I barely wrote anything at all. But that would all change sometime in 2016, when I decided to make a trip to a Barnes and Noble. Call it God, fate, or whatever it is that people believe in nowadays, I unsuspectingly picked up a small book titled milk and honey by an emerging poet named Rupi Kaur. Unbeknownst to her, her literary ambitions were about to set off a bazooka.
