ap lang assignment

hi i wrote this for lang it's about where i feel most at home ok bai

My basement wall is covered with posters, game rules, setlists, photostrips, drum heads, and drawings. Green blanket, rug, tapestry, chair. Danelectro, Epiphone, Casio, Tama. Alone in the cleanest, greenest room you’ve ever seen, songs of forgiveness drown out the sound of spiders giving birth. If I look up, my neck cracks and I can see webs on the breaker box. If I were the barred owl in the tree outside, I could turn my head three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to see Martha, my pet road sign.

“Road Under Construction,” she says.

I got a new splash cymbal. I think of my friend and the funny thing she said about the last new cymbal I got. The first time I brought my own cymbals to summer camp. The crying after the audition. The gossip in the dorm rooms. The boy who never called me anything but my name. Covering my ears in anticipation as a new boy sits behind the kit and plays the worst I have ever seen anyone do.

There’s a stain from God-knows-what on the couch. I think of that boy and all the things he never called me. I think of the girl who sits on this couch smelling of cigarettes. She is tall and her hair is dark and she cries if she looks at the clock for too long. I think of the boy who cannot play drums; we sat on this couch too. I had hairballs in my brain and he pulled teeth out of my resonator guitar. He is much better at that.

Where do I feel most like myself? I could give a sad answer. Mitsuki might say at the bottom of a glass. Liz might say in someone else’s mouth. At first, I would likely say in my mind because, like most posers, I consider myself introspective. But I’ve seen enough TV shows and Flock cameras to know that I don’t own the rights to my neurons. And if I had eyes in the back of my head, I would look into my brain and see Road Under Construction.

If I gave it a little more thought, I’d think about my basement. A logical choice; every inch of it is full of me, and every inch of me full of it. Here, even when there are people watching my TV and playing my drums and sitting on my couch, I am me despite myself.

When I look deeper, however, I realize that this room is stains and webs and fingerprints; fragments of each iteration of me. If you glued the pieces of this room together, you could map my whole life story in a zoetrope, but it’d be covered in pill dust and eraser shavings.

Where do I feel most like myself? A little over a month ago, I left home with all the parts of me and laid them out expectantly before my new friends. And the more I talked about myself, the more I realized I was describing the version of me you could build from my basement. When I would tell a story, they would look at me like they believed every word. But later, I would watch their eyes and see them truly understand. 

Backstage, I splay across a sofa. The show is over and there is a new boy beside me. I’m explaining why I always overshare. I am clean, but a trail of blood leads outside. Center-stage, my still-beating heart.