I am Evelyn Alt. A gymnast, a student, a sister, and a friend. 

I wish I was a writer. 

I wish that words flowed through my fingertips like honey, I wish that analogies didn’t feel so forced, and I wish this column was easier to write. 

I wish that I were a writer because I love words.

I love words that come from stories. I love quotes and books and poems. I love other people’s words the way I wish I loved my own. 

I could listen to someone talk for hours on end about anything they cared about. I could listen to their words change volume and pitch with emotion. 

Words possess power and knowledge that only a few people know how to use, and I am not one of them.

I wish I was a musician. 

I wish melodies poured out of my soul and onto the delicate strings of a cello. I wish I could make people cry with only a few faint notes of my instrument.

I wish I had hundreds of perfectly curated playlists. One just right for each and every emotion I felt throughout the day.

But I can’t and I don’t and so instead I’ll settle for searching up other people’s playlists and pretending that their music taste is my own. 

I’ll listen to my sister play piano and convince myself that I could pick up the skill in a heartbeat if I wanted to, but I never do. 

I wish I was well-read. 

I wish I could read classics without getting bored in the first sixty pages. I wish I understood classical allusions and got excited when I heard them. 

I wish I annotated books with precision and flawlessness. I wish that I wrote witty and intelligent comments on the margins of pages so that someone else might come along and read them after me.

I buy pens and highlighters and color-coded sticky tabs in the hopes that they will provide enough motivation for me to finally grasp the theme, mood, and imagery in every chapter of the books I read. 

I wish I was an artist.

I wish I spent my Sunday afternoons wandering aimlessly through art galleries with a cappuccino in my hand. I wish I understood the deeper meaning behind every work of art I passed. 

I wish that the doodles in my notebooks told more stories than I can speak. I wish they meant more than “I’m bored.”

I wish I could see something and find the beauty hidden within it, and could perfectly capture that beauty with nothing more than paper and a pencil.

But I can’t, or maybe I just don’t want to put the work in to try. Either way, I always end up putting down my pencil before I’ve even started, saying I’m too busy to try that day.

I am Evelyn Alt. A gymnast, a student, a sister, and a friend. But sometimes I wish I was so much more.