I see my father’s handwriting and the memories strike like warm bourbon in my belly. I’m a victim of my own curiosity. After ordering my high school transcripts for NYIAD, I splurged the extra six dollars for a copy of my entire public school record. I audibly gasp when I opened my public school registration. It’s handwritten…by my father. Looking at the bold black ink on a document that, these days, would require a digital form, brings me back to 1999.
Back when you didn’t have to add area codes to phone numbers, and not everything was typed. Back to the days when I looked forward to being as beautiful as my mother, and as precise as my father. Back when my dad was a Deputy Sheriff, my mom worked at the Pentagon, and I knew just little enough to believe that life followed the rhythm of reason and not fate.
In 1999, my mother, in her billowing skirts, smells fresh, like wintermint and wind. She dances back and forth between the demands of her studying children, and the popping grease at the stove. My father, whose starch-pressed uniform smells like Classic Match, is reclined on the couch, glasses atop his head. He is balancing our forms on his knee using whatever notebook we supplied him. The first few buttons of his uniform are undone, but his collar still stands proudly at attention, only yielding when he turns to talk to Grandma.
That summer I would fall in love with Lauryn Hill’s voice. I would enter public school and finally feel like a minority. I would be bullied by a girl named Ta’Kiyah, and begin my quest for a best friend. I would learn to use the dictionary.
I shake free from the bittersweet burn of memories and open the NYIAD homepage. I upload the transcripts I am back in 2021, uploading digital records of an almost-forgotten time.
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