From Young Me

I wish I could recall the first thing I wrote. I'm unsure how it happened, but I was always a writer and a reader. Though I believe I started as the latter. While other kids watched television, I read. I finished classwork early, which I did for the sole purpose of reading more. I remember a few journal entries about a girl who liked a boy, a story much like others; I doodled my alternate names often.

“Mrs. Jazmine Davidson”

“Mrs. Jazmine Churchill”

If I had to say the first story I ever wrote, I would tell you it was a trilogy about aliens attacking Earth. I wrote these stories with a boy named Isaiah. I loved his blue eyes and freckled face. I was in second grade, and most of the kids knew I was the daughter of a single father, and they made fun of me repeatedly.

Isaiah was the son of a single mother, and he understood. He would walk with me at recess when the other children decided they couldn't play with me due to my circumstances. I remember not telling my dad this was the case, just that my best friend Alexandra one day said to me, “My parents said I couldn't be friends with you because you only have a dad”.

I wondered what made me different other than having a mother who didn't want me or know my birthday. None of that mattered to Isaiah. He had ideas, and I could write them down. We took turns, talking swiftly between lesson plans and games of tag. He would write some lines and scribble them out, asking me to write them, he liked my hand writing. Our alliance went on for months, us scribbling frantically on these lined notebooks.

I remember we had a class field trip to a water slide Park, and it was the first time Isaiah held my hand. We rode rides together, and I felt brave with him on these rides. I remember his mom being so kind to me and my dad not being there because he had to work, and I missed him. Isaiah held my hand and gave me snacks, and it was one of the only times we didn't write anything. The next day at school, the characters in our story were to be married, an idea that I treasured and took to mean us.

I remember Isaiah moving away, and I'm unsure what happened to the trilogy then. I did make some new friends eventually, who didn't seem to mind I only had a dad. However, if I think about my first writing collaboration, I think of Isaiah and our trilogy. I'm curious of what became of that notebook, and if continued writing long after our alliance. Of course, I did, perhaps for the both of us.