The Words You Don't See

Part 1: Dérive

Dérive. (French) (n.) A spontaneous journey where the traveler leaves their life behind for a time to let the contours of the surrounding architecture direct them.

I don’t recall much of my life at age thirteen. Purposefully. I’ve trained my brain to forget that rough reality. I’ve stacked memories on top of memories, hoping the weight of these new events would cause my recollection of age thirteen to trickle down into a void of forgetfulness.

At age thirteen, I entered a new high school. The school was a wealthy, private school. Majority of the kids were white. Therefore, my broad hips and coily hair stuck out like a sore thumb. My classmates would snicker behind my back. They would ask themselves how a girl like me could ever be admitted into a school with them? To them, my dirt-colored skin meant that I was dirt poor. They weren’t wrong, but they weren’t right, either. My family made ends meet. Luckily, a scholarship funded my admittance into this school. None of my classmates ever thought to ask me if I was smart, though.

They soon found out, however. My GPA began to accumulate, and my class rank began to form. By midterm, I received accolades for my performance. This did not sit well with my peers, and weeks later I found myself sitting in the principal’s office.

“I regret to inform you that your scholarship is revoked,” he told me.

Apparently, I stole some kid’s lunch money. No one cared to consult me about an act that I supposedly committed until it was time for punishment. No one dared to notice that my absence would bring the accuser’s class rank up to mine.

This incident made me so upset and so chaotic that I marched out of the school building. With tears in my eyes, I hopped onto my bike. I pedaled ferociously towards my home. This routine trek, returning home from school, was now deviated with an early arrival and heart-shattering news.

This calamity is why I purposefully work so hard to forget age thirteen. But I can’t. Because on that same day, my life was redirected. As I drove my bike at full speed to leave behind the horridness of that school day, a crack in the sidewalk stifled my rapid acceleration. The unexpected rupture caused my front wheel to twist inward which caused me to launch forward. I came crashing down a couple of feet away from where my bike laid. My body ached, so I groaned. I kept my eyes shut and stayed planted on the ground.

Seconds later, I decided to open my eyes slowly. I blinked once, then twice, then a third time. To my surprise, when I fully opened my eyes, something on the ground caught my attention: A small black notebook. I looked around to see if it belonged to anyone, but no one was in sight.

I was mystified. I took this route every day, twice a day: Once to school and once back home. I never encountered that crack in the sidewalk, and I most certainly never encountered that black notebook.

I opened the notebook, and on the first page was a single command: Define dérive and tell how it relates to your life. I never heard of that word, so I did as the notebook instructed. I discovered dérive was French, and I discovered its meaning. I picked up the black book and decided to write about that day. I wrote about how the day started off normally. I wrote about how I received devastating news. I wrote about how I decided to flee and just leave the school behind me. I wrote about the crack in the sidewalk. I wrote about how that crack directed me to this small black notebook. The last thing I wrote was a question: Where will this notebook lead me? Little did I know, that little black book would lead me to my passion: Writing.

Part 2: Forelsket

Forelsket. (Norwegian.) (n.) The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.

I turned fourteen a couple of months after my scholarship got revoked, and my life began to brighten. I was homeschooled for the remainder of my ninth-grade year. After telling my parents what happened, they attempted to fight back for my reentry. The entire process was incredibly draining and tedious. In the end, my family and I decided that we didn’t need to work so hard to gain acceptance into a toxic environment. The only plus side of constantly going back to that school to try and sue or to, at least, regain my scholarship was that every day I passed the little black notebook. It was always in the same spot with a new word every day. I would pick it up, define my new term, write a new story regarding the term, and then I would place the book back where I found it. The following day, I would return to the black book, and my past story would actually be corrected and have feedback, usually positive. The black book would also have a new word written on the following blank page.

Every day I wondered who the person was behind the black book. I wondered how they found the words they had me define. I wondered if they ever saw me as I wrote. I wondered why they kept up this charade with me. I wondered what they thought of me. I was basically pouring out my life story in the pages they left me. Sometimes they would leave a comment on one of my stories, such as, “your words touched me today” or “don’t let the world knock you down. Continue to stand tall.” The comments were always small, but they always meant so much to me. It was nice knowing my words, my stories, connected with someone else out there in the world. It was nice knowing that I was being heard and that I was being understood.

The black book and writing in it touched me so much so that even after I became homeschooled, I continued to ride my bike towards that wretched high school. I never went to the school, of course. I only went to the black book.

One day, I picked the book up, opened it to a new page, and found the word Forelsket. I searched the web for the word and found it was Norwegian. Forelsket meant the euphoria of first falling in love.

Now, I had never been in love before. At least, not with another person. I was only fourteen. So, I began to think of other ways I’d fallen in love. The first thing to pop into my mind was the wind, and how every day I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the feeling of the wind—how it whisked around and through the crevices of my body, as if ordaining me to be its dance floor. I fell in love with the sound of wind—how it made music rustling and bustling through the trees and bushes that stood in its way. I fell in love with the thought of wind—how if I closed my eyes and imagined hard enough, I could see it carrying me to a distant place. I fell in love with how the wind symbolized hope and faith—you couldn’t see it, but you could feel it, and you knew it would be there.

So, I decided to write about the wind. And as I wrote about the wind—as I moved my pen along the lined paper, as I meticulously picked the apt words to say, as I focused so intently that my surroundings blurred, as I wrote so abundantly that my words overflowed onto a second page, as I knew that someone would read, understand, and connect with my words—I felt forelsket. Only this time, I realized that I was, truly, falling in love for the first time. Not with the wind but with the act of writing and with my words.

Part 3: Haitoshi

Haitoshi. (Swahili) (adj.) It is not enough.

At the age of fifteen, the little black book—filled with my thoughts, filled with my words, filled with my story, filled my heart, filled with, essentially, me—just disappeared. It vanished as if into thin air. For three months, I rode to the spot where the book was always held to find it gone. I checked the surrounding corners. I checked the buildings along the sidewalk. I checked across the street. I even asked other people if they had come across the book. My eyes only fell unto empty spaces and my ears were only filled with the sickening screeches of no.

It may sound dramatic or outlandish for me to say, but it felt as though wherever the book fled, it took my heart with it. Every day I came to find a blank sidewalk, my eyes would dam with tears, threatening to overflow at any given moment. Losing the little black book felt as though I lost a close friend as well. The more corrections and feedback I received from the anonymous owner of the book, the better my stories became. The more comments the owner left me, the bigger the smile on my face grew.

Now, all that was gone.

By month five, I stopped going out of my way to look for the book. If I happened to pass the spot on the way to the store or on the way to visit family, I would stop and look around for it. I would maybe ask a person or two if they’d seen it.

By month seven, I stopped searching altogether.

By month nine, I tried to push the memories of the little black book so deep down inside that they could converse with the attempted forgotten memories of age thirteen.

By month eleven, my sixteenth birthday came around. The only wish I wished on my candles was for the little black book to be found.

By month thirteen, a book was released. The book was entitled The Words You Don’t See. The author was anonymous. I paid it no mind until one day while walking, I overheard someone reading a page. The page was about racism, fancy schools, and unfair situations.

I went over to the person reading and asked, “Excuse me, may I see your book?”

The person eagerly replied yes and began to praise the novel, but all I heard was white noise. As I flipped through the pages, I realized The Words You Don’t See were the words of me. This book was the little black book published. This book was my words spread to the world without my permission. This book was my words spread to the world without my recognition. This book was like ninth grade all over again: Something I loved and worked hard for getting stolen from me in an instant. I felt sick.

I gave the person I borrowed the book from their book back then made my way home. Once home, I hopped on my bike and rode towards the crack in the sidewalk where the little black book was supposed to be. Of course, it wasn’t there, but an owner of a store located on the sidewalk waved to me. I went inside his store, and he handed me the little black book.

“This what you been looking for?” He asked me. “Someone brought it to the store a couple weeks ago. I’ve been holding it for you.”

I thanked him. I took the book in my hands and I looked at it. It looked the same as it always did. This time, though, there was a guilted weight to it. Inside was a check for $20,000: A thank you for writing their best-selling novel. I scoffed. My life story was only worth $20,000 to this person. Haitoshi. Not enough.