A College Essay
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley…”
Sitting shotgun in Mama’s Honda, six-year-old me thumbed through pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, shakily sounding out and stumbling through each syllable. Earning each word through patience and persistence, Mama and I collected fragments of the passionate voice I would carry for the rest of my life.
Though my Potterhead years are behind me, literature remains my favorite subject. Reading was not just a means of strengthening fluency in English, but also a passage for self discovery and introspection. Unlike STEM subjects, art is not bound by facts. Emotional and personal; every individual interprets the same work differently. As a queer woman, I am drawn to classic literature because of my desire to see myself represented in history.
Analyzing literature gave me a way to organize my haphazard identity and participate in the scavenger hunt that is searching for hints of queerness. Beyond the quagmire of overused essay prompts and so-called ‘right answers,’ classic novels are full of excitement, intrigue, and homosexuality. Frankenstein and Clerval. Horatio’s devotion to Hamlet. The line “you’re not unnatural…you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else.” As a 12-year-old girl who had begun to consider that she might not be 100% straight, detached scavenging was enough of a reminder that I wasn’t alone.
In a world where queer people have been erased from history, literature affirms our existence throughout humanity. After all, it was Sappho who once said, “Someone will remember us, even in another time.”
I remember her. It is irrelevant that she was a Greek woman living in antiquity and that I am an Indian-American girl that will never see a year beginning with 19. I know exactly why Sappho wrote “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.” I lived those lines while missing a friend’s entire explanation on some journalism assignment because I was busy admiring her instead.
This time, I’m the one driving. Keeping my eyes on the road and my heart in my chest, I declare myself to my family.