Sitting in silence, my eyes scan through the ancient book situated in my lap, contemplating all the letters of the alphabet scrambled around the page. 

My pencil twists and twirls around the margins, perfecting each swirl and triangle I illustrate. The page is covered in words written by Atticus, each sentence clouding my head with buried thoughts. But my simplistic drawings add so much depth to the blank, white pages that lay before my eyes. 

Each word strikes a different portion of my brain, cranking the gears of my mind, begging me to read between the lines of each sentence, and to take each individual phrase and morph it into a new meaning.

Poetry was never an interest of mine—the format always complicated and perplexed my thoughts, a constant battle in my mind of failing to comprehend the deeper meaning. I couldn’t fathom how haikus and sonnets entangled the interest of others. The way people could be so intrigued by something as simple as writing in a book was baffling. But now after the distress, heartbreak, and unfortunate circumstances I’ve endured, I truly understand what it means to apprehend and utilize words. 

I could now spend hours upon hours indulging in works by Peppernell and Kaur. When I am diving underneath each word soaking up the passionate feelings expressed, each sentence is equal to a ripe strawberry, sweet and full of passion aching to be released. 

Each quote basks in my mind till I grasp various emotions: anguish, betrayal, affection, compassion, every perception available to me. I think and ponder about how this will change who I am. 

It makes my person long to become more.

The girl she was before she explored the empowerment of words was that of a fawn—frail and uncomfortable with wide-open eyes searching for anyone and everything to captivate her immature heart and fill it with appreciation. She took life for granted and sought happiness through the eyes of others, disregarding their true, cold intentions. She was naive to herself, only shedding thought to everyone else around her.

Breaking through her past, she presently strives to individualize herself to an unusual extent. Taking the nouns and adjectives she discovered through poetry, twisting them under her own understanding, and spitting them out like a fireball. Her hopes and dreams consist of advancing more than the average and hiding her heart from the users. Differentiating and becoming more is her biggest aspiration. 

More than the thick, chalky triangles illustrated over her math tests, covering each problem she failed to understand, and the gritty swirls covering her physics notes that are incomprehensible, she craves metamorphosis into an unfamiliar version of herself.

To change in ways she has only imagined since she was a child, to flourish under the pressure of her teenage years and catch all the words she has read and transform herself into something better, are her sunsets on the faraway, but attainable, horizon.