16. NARRATIVE
ESSAY!
WHERE IT ALL
COMES
TOGETHER...
17. That One Day – Mertol Ozaltan
Even a single day in my life is full of little details that add up to make the
day significant. The days all add up and each day contributes somehow to the
overall end I will get out of this life. It is a very, very long process to understand
the value and importance of each waking minute. It does not just happen after
one gets facial hair or one gets a job. It’s a very long road ahead. However, one
damn ordinary day in January helped me understand this fact a bit more: the
importance of each experience. I know, when I fully understand this, the more
success and happiness, my life, will be filled with.
I had forgotten it was Monday, and thought it was a lazy Sunday, but I
knew it wasn’t when the parents woke me up at 7:00 AM in the goddamn
morning. It was a nice Turkish breakfast, and a nice car ride to school through
the roads, lightly sprinkled with January snow. The traffic was not nice
however. I laughed and made jokes with my father, who was driving, and asked
questions about his past just out of my random curiosity. I thought about what
the day would bring, during this change of setting, while staring into the foggy
window and turning the heat off since it was burning my face. I’d find out what
the day would bring, though it would end up to be a day with a similar routine
to most. Seeing friends and teachers, doing schoolwork, manoeuvring through
hallway traffic and maybe writing a little test or quiz. I got out of the car, as me
and my father now had separate places to go.
18. The morning at school was quite joyful. I made some smartass points in
English, interacted with my calculator and desk neighbours in physics and
math, and had salt put on my tongue in biology so the class could find out
where the tongue tasted salty things. During lunch, which freed me from my
involuntary second home, I took a walk with some friends in the nearby forest,
even if the weather was a bit crappy. A prickle from a plant bled my knee a bit, a
nearby garter snake scared us nearly halfway to death, and we were 54 seconds
late for school because we walked the full path. Though walking through
Oakwood Bush was a very good waste of forty minutes. I preferred the classes
during the next half of the school day, maybe they go with me better. I watched
a film from the Top 100 in drama class, even though I became a bit impatient, I
played more with my calculator in Writer’s Craft than my writing skills, and
thought I was going to die in chemistry because I touched a grain of sodium
chlorate. It was a school day full of experiencing crazy, boring and joyful shit.
All in one package. A little bit of everything that made the day one to
remember.
19. Fast forward to after the sunset, where I sat in my room at home, waiting
for dinner, and lazily doing my homework with the binder and calculator
sitting in front of me. I went to the kitchen to join my parents’
conversation, but unfortunately, politics and finance still make me impatient
quite often. We sat down at the dinner table a quarter past seven, and I, taking
my parents’ advice to slow down, took a good thirty minutes to eat my
meal, rather than the usual five or ten. Once a week I drink wine or beer at the
table, this happened to be the day, I sipped the wine slowly like a royal fool, and
let every drop leave its own story. I had nowhere to flee from the dinner
table, and I didn’t need to watch the end of a re-run of Family Feud to see if the
family won $20,000; this soothing cuisine experience was my own prize. For the
next half hour, I played some random tunes on my keyboard, and I actually
tried to learn a song this time, error after error after error, I survived the agony.
20.
21. This one span of sixteen hours had almost the exact same robotic routine
as most of my days in my sixteen years of life. However, little do young people
like myself, realize the importance of the little things that happen in that
routine, like the conversations, the connections, the realizations, the
achievements and even the smallest and shittiest of all moments. As I
experience more days and look back on them, the more I learn how to enjoy
every moment and have patience, it brings me better control of where my life is
headed. Unless I were to get hit by a car or something along those lines. But
being alive is one damn uplifting feeling, and so is trying to get a taste out of
the most simplest things, such as a meatball dinner. You won’t be alive forever,
so live while you can. As Ayn Rand said to us: "Ask yourself whether the dream
of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves or whether it
should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
FIN
