Frankly, my life would have made a pretty boring book, even if I fancied thinking of myself as a somewhat decent book character.
I took a Creative Writing class in middle school. My teacher, Mrs. Noel, always encouraged her students to put a lot of action into their stories. A girl who buys an ice cream, Mrs. Noel would say, wasn’t likely to make a good story if the hardest decision she had to make throughout the course of the writing was to pick an ice cream flavour. Now, she would insist, the story could become much more exciting if the ice cream vendor turned out to be a zombie. Or, say, if the girl was eaten by a zombie on her way back. Or, for instance, the chocolate ice cream turned the girl into – surprise, surprise – a zombie. She was pretty obsessed with zombies, that teacher of mine. I got her point nonetheless and the example about the ice cream stuck forever in my mind. I could easily identify myself with the girl whose most complicated dilemma of the day was whether to have a chocolate or vanilla ice cream. In fact, I saw myself in that hypothetical girl to such an extent that I practically became her. I would wake up every morning and think to myself two flavours of ice cream and by the end of the day I would have decided what the day’s flavour was. It became an automatic habit, almost like having breakfast or brushing my teeth. The alarm clock would ring and my first conscious thought would be, it’s blueberry or pineapple today. Then, what I’d do, I’d bet the choice on a certain highlight of my day. Like, if I was about to know my Math test grade, I would make it pineapple for an A and blueberry for anything less. Nobody understood what was with those imaginary ice cream flavours of mine. It was weird to most people, and that settled it for them – “weird” was a nice simple label they could comprehend. To me, the flavour game was simply a way of adding just a spoonful more meaning to my average days.
Mrs. Noel ensured the class that if our plot was creative and eventful, it would compensate if by chance our characters weren’t vivid enough. As far as she was concerned, the answer to “Why do we care about this character?” would be something rather resembling “Because the character was attacked by a zombie.” The self-absorbed sixth-grader I was thought about reading a book about herself, and could almost hear in her mind English teachers asking their students, “Now, why do we care about Martha Gallagher?” Provided that they were like Mrs. Noel, they wouldn’t quite like me as a character, because the story of my life wasn’t particularly full of zombies. I tended to dream big, made grand plans about the future, had an imaginative mind and enjoyed various kinds of art, but my reality was just plain boring. I lived in a tranquil district of a small town, was an only child, attended school in the vicinity, and knew my best friend since I was three. And despite that most of the time I was fooling myself successfully enough, there were times when I was completely aware of the fact that it wasn’t really of great importance whether the day’s flavour would be pistachio or cherry sorbet.
Every now and then I would wish for anything to happen – in my desperate moments, I supposed I would gladly welcome even an unfortunate change, just as long as it was any change at all. I never believed in the saying “Be careful what you wish for,” because my wishes were more than reluctant to come true, even the most trivial ones – like, every single school morning when I wished my hair would stay intact after I’ve brushed it, but it never did. As I had an ice cream flavour explanation for almost every aspect or situation in my life, that’s how I saw it: I wished I could wake up with the options of red orange and mint, and be able to pick Bavarian cream.
The day the most desired change began to stir was a watermelon flavoured day, which could have been peanut butter had I not turned in my lab report on time. It was also the day when “Be careful what you wish for” started making a bit more sense.
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