Fall From Grace
JESSICA SIDRAK
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A beautiful sheet,
thin and fragile, malleable, ductile, dancing on a sea of chaotic convulsions, teetering on the edge of destructive misfortunes, oblivious and ignorant, full of bliss, hardly there and yet, because of this, it is. This is childhood. These are barren skies, revealing the puffed chest of morning light These are fleeting waters and racing streams, vessels of life This is believing without seeing, soaring without flight; Flying with liberty at the beak and captivity at the hind That is, until wings are broken and feathers plucked, and the short-lived flight of the bird ends in a cloud of dust and dawn darkens to dusk on the beautiful sheet which, no longer delicate or weightless, is drawn of its life and into the gaping darkness below, where both the sheet and the flightless fowl are laid to rest and what was once hardly there is now not at all. This is adulthood. |
The love of language begins with the love of speaking it, or in Jessica Sidrak's case the inability to. She owes her love of English and the art of expression through it to the fact that it was not the first language she learned. Her native language is Arabic, and it was the first language she learned after her parents immigrated to the United States from Egypt. Bilingualism fostered an appreciation for the structure and depth of language, even if not in the first tongue that she uttered. As Jessica has learned, there is power in saying something without speaking it.