I remember being young and wanting to know what I was not. 

 I felt the need for that in order to know what I was for. 

 I write to you as a songbird with a pen. I’ve had a word and a song and a refusal to get soaked in much else. It used to confuse me, how one could see lone bird eggs in a location far from a nest.

 I write to you in a body of water I truly know nothing about. I hold out a hand to you through a voice, which you may never hear and only imply by letters we were taught. It is the single certain thing that binds us two explorers closer to feeling and knowing each other.     

 I’ve never actually called a body of water mine before. I have never sailed to imply a love, or left a life behind to visit it. My surrounding world rows with their paddles to tell me I should, but I always turn elsewhere.  

 Scientifically, nobody knows most things about this all-encapsulating giant named Water.  

 Eighty percent of the ocean is left undiscovered. That’s pretty funny, though, because it makes up seventy percent of our world. 
  What we mainly live in is the elixir of all we have never figured out. 

  Perspectivally, it’s fascinating that more is unknown than fully even thought about. That is why there is not, never has been, or never will be a “more realistic career path.” That is why it aches me to know that pianos cost money and song-writing children are told to become lawyers. 

  It is giant beyond calculation, this life, because this world is. It makes for an incalculable amount of otherness that we can become. But we are often institutionally tricked into believing that’s untrue, and that what surrounds us is very uniform. 

  I got away this past weekend. I took that annual trip from desk to bed. I failed to beat any allegation about my generation and opened TikTok. 

  I immediately saw an eloquent, fresh out of Bridgerton, winged eyeliner expert middle school teacher with dark bags under the eyes. Her camera was set up on what I’d imagine to be a laptop or a book. Sitting at her desk past the bell, she glanced around for signs of students or administrators. She found there was none, and that it was just her, her thoughts, and a select few humans through a field of blue light. She took a real deep breath. 

  “Kids just don’t care anymore.”  

  I see and I ache for this teacher. She cares. 

  But, she is also right. 

  They don’t care. 

  Like, seriously. 

  Not that she’s to blame, though. I think the institution of education fails certain kids through a system they aren’t quite for. 

  The thing with birds is that they learn to assign value once given material to build a home for their keeping. Then can they thrive? They aren’t quite sure what to do with buckets of water, or whole ponds even. 

  Perhaps there’s that bird in all of us. There certainly was in the me that used to not care. 

  I often think about my seventh-grade pre-algebra class. Not because I struggled with the homework and never quite understood variables. Not even because I was often distressed by the length of the exams. This reason found its way outside room 14C, and even outside pre-teen-hood. 

  I had asked the teacher to name three daily necessities for the keeping of a human. When she answered food, water, and shelter, I had just knowingly grinned. She asked me why. 

  I reminded her that she did not say Unit 5 Lesson 3 or proportional relationships.

  I look back and wish I could have treated her kindly. I also look back with a painful understanding of that version of myself.  

  I opened up a twenty-page document entitled “Unnamed Project” and started typing until the bell. 

  I opened it up this past weekend, too. I’m now nearing the second semester of my junior year, and “Unnamed Project” is a file so big that it needed several sub-folders.  

  Several more words and files were to come. 

 That’s where I’ve been finding my life’s value. That’s where I find my purpose. That’s my nesting material. That’s my love. 

  Falling in love with a thing for any amount of time is a deep learning experience. I would still argue that it’s one of the best selfish things love brings. It was never quite something I could learn through a timeline of presidents, or different aqueous solutions. As grateful as I am for those lessons, I think a pen becomes the best lesson for anyone who wants it to be.  

  If I, with not very much affluence, were societally encouraged to proceed with that pen, that would have changed my game. I like to think I would have believed in myself quite a bit more. Perhaps the sixty-percents I would earn on science and math exams would not have made me question my purpose on such a big roster. Perhaps if I were taught to be louder for longer, I could have earlier developed a voice of protest to all that smears ink. 

  On a grand scale, pressure within our brains does not exist to hold us back until institutionalized pressure does. 

  That is why our education systems should seek to raise every love and future. 

  Writing aside from pressure’s water made me understand the importance of contributing to my world. It helped me find value in diminishing what diminished it. It helped me find a passion for living and holding space and speaking. It made me understand that we are our own special creatures with our specific, equally important habitats. 

  Most birds can not swim. What they can do, though, is travel with their words and songs to build themselves a reason to lay in. I think that is something to celebrate.

    Let’s believe that our pens are much stronger than the water of society. If birds and their words are not given a soft place to land, we could crack them.