Sophia Martinez

Service

I haven't always lived in my imagination. I don't know where or when it started, but I think it could have been whenever I first heard the radio. I won't even begin to try and remember the first time I heard a song on the radio--that memory is stored well on the back of a shelf, somewhere I will never grow tall enough to be able to reach. That's completely okay. I know for a fact that throughout my life I've spent many hours behind a window pane, watching the world buzz along before me, and no matter how far I have been driven, I will never not be disappointed coming back to reality, which essentially means: getting out of the car. The radio cradled my existence for a while--I didn't know music came from anywhere else until I got my first cell phone. Every nook of my memory has a song playing in the background, no matter how fast, or how bright the memory, music has always brought that inhabitance of another planet into my life, even when I had nothing to escape from. Then, I started watching movies on cable, read my first whole chapter book, got my first cell phone, and my first pair of headphones. The radio finally became the background noise it was meant to be, but my imagination and inner life unspooled until I had no way to express it anymore. 

My parents always tell me that I was an awful child--awful in that I cried and screamed and threw tantrums all of the time, and they were constantly clueless as to why. My mom told me once she finally had enough and took me to a psychiatric office, just for them to tell her that I was "very smart but had no way of expressing it." I think I found my way to express it around fifth grade; that's coincidentally when I stopped throwing tantrums, too. My Spotify usage must have skyrocketed then: music and lyricism was my bridge back into that seat behind the window pane. A desire to be a songwriter fizzled into a desire to be just a writer. My escapes were the same, but I began choosing them. When you begin choosing how your mind wants to operate, you become less susceptible to uncontrollable emotions. My balance was coming home and writing all about everything at the end of the school day, reading poems or listening to lyrics about exactly how I felt. 

Now, I'm seventeen, and sometime along a drive or a poetry submission I realized that writing could be a dutiful and profitable thing for me. But, once my escape becomes the ultimate pillar of reality for me and my life, that only means that it becomes an escape for others. That doesn't mean I lose the identity of an inhabitant of my imagination, only that I am susceptible to company. I want that company. To write, for me, is to not be a symbol of incomprehension. My family is a very hard one to be understood in--I don't think anyone has ever done it, hence why we all visit a psychiatric office of our own at least once a month. 

If there is a girl or a woman sitting behind a window pane somewhere, I want to be her calling. I want to be the lull of imagination that lingers and forever wanders people's consciousness, because to wake out of life once in a while is to realize the value of it. All those hours, in reality, I was watching people: those with lives of sizes I could never imagine, with children and wrinkles to carry and songs to sing. Watching over places that I've been and will not ever be, places that house every person I want to write for. Being a writer, of any kind, would move me across all the land, and thicken the aid of imagination that I have for so long lost myself in, and therefore is my ultimate act of service.