Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Seung-Hui Jeong/Essay First Draft/Thursday 1-3PM

First Encounter

7th grade, school cafeteria. My friend and I were looking for lunch tables to sit at in middle school when we decided to join a group of kids in our year that looked friendly enough. We were part of the new Asian kids that year and school was already exotic enough without the added pressure of the need to blend in. Some greeted us with enthusiasm, some didn't, which was to be expected in most rearrangement of cliques. It was only when I sat down, hanging my backpack on the side of the chair and set my lunch plate on the table, when I started to take in the faces of everyone at the table.

She was sitting in front of me and after a brief hello, she went back to sifting her fork through the mound of pasta with a concentrated face. For the sake of convenience, I will call her P. P was neither enthusiastic nor was she discontent with the two new strangers in front of her. In fact knowing her now, she was probably wondering why the lunch ladies could never get the ratio of pesto and tomato sauce just right or why the school took out the cinnamon bun only to add in the blueberry muffins. She didn't talk throughout the entire lunch but I could tell she wasn't sulking or being moody.

It was only when we were moving to our next classes that we started talking. She was pretty much silent during the entire lunch so it came as a surprise for her to start talking first. I do not remember the first conversation we ever had. I do, however, remember everything else about her. The slouch of her shoulders and her walk. Oh, her walk. Her walk was so distinct that I could recognize her just by the sound of her step. P had feet that were large enough that made it hard for her to find decent shoes in the women's department, which had her fantasize about petite mary-janes and oxfords. It was precisely these feet that made her walk with a rather flap to the ground, resembling what it looks like to be walking in scuba diving fins. This walk came with a set of her concentrated expression on her face, a façade of her ever-so hectic mind that constantly ran at a hundred miles per second with the rest of us just happening to be part of the swiftly changing scenery.

She was the only person that I have ever met that truly enjoyed watching horror movies. I mean, she laughed and was almost brought to tears in scenes that made me shut my eyes and ears simultaneously. We sat through Saw and Paranormal Activity and Pan's Labyrinth with her snorting her popcorn throughout them all while I cringed in terror beside her.

And it was also P who shaped the core of my identity. She was acute to both her and other's emotions and believed it was important to comb through the layers and layers of vague emotions to truly pinpoint the one emotion that is the catalyst to one's actions. She believed this was a crucial process of understanding oneself and it was this that allowed me to get through some of the hardest moments of my life. Her philosophy about every aspect in life seeped slowly but surely and entwined through mine throughout the years I came to know her and became my mental axis. It didn't come as a surprise then when she decided to become a psychology major. Without her influence, I would have remained dull to subtle emotions, unable to truly connect with others on an intimate level.

All that has shaped me as who I am, in its core, can be attributed to P. This reads almost like a love letter and in some ways it is. I have never thought to put pen to paper or rather ink to word doc in writing out P's influence on my life. Writing what was visually and mentally fuzzy but vibrant and seemingly whole seems to dull down when it is declared in detail and made tangible. Tangibility, however, is what makes memories last and my first encounter with her and her influence are memories that I would feel hollow without later on.

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