Threading the Needle by Tori Ziege

My niece, Tori, was asked to write a paper about one defining moment in her life. She called me, frustrated and thinking she had a boring life, since she could not come up with ONE single important, defining moment! As her words entered my thoughts, I could feel her frustration. I felt, if given the same assignment, I could not wrote about just one moment. Sharing those thoughts with Tori and discussing some of her life events. I could feel her energy and thoughts shifting to a VERY creative solution! Here is her interesting and insightful interpretation of the assignment.

Fear controls your body like a puppeteer. Pull the strings on your legs; they tremble as though they’re in an earthquake. Pulls the strings on your eyes; they roll back inside your head. Pulls the strings on your hands, and for the umpteenth time you tightly grip the harness of your parachute, making sure everything is secure and operational. 5...4...3...2...1...JUMP! Suddenly, the strings of fear are cut, and you’re propelled forward. Clouds rush past you faster than the high speeds of Comcast internet, and your life flashes before your eyes. What do you see? What memories, what events, have shaped and justified your time on Earth? That’s the question I was faced to answer, and at the moment, a flashback would seem more like a black out. Cotton ball clouds and bright blue skies would become an endless void, too dark to see the parachute chord. And I’d be falling… falling… falling…

“Tori!” Talia’s voice shattered through my reverie, “Have you decided what you’re going to write about yet?”

“No,” I huffed, glaring at my computer monitor as though it were to blame. The screen was like a sheet of printer paper in a snow storm, you couldn’t see anything but white.

“Here, now she has something,” offered Christian, his giant catcher’s mitt hands quickly typing gibberish letters across the page.

“Oh yes, that’ll be the next best-seller in the Wall Street Journal,” chuckled Brian on the other side of me. Today was Friday, which meant that his hair looked like a fraidy cat’s fur standing on end… after sticking it’s paw in an electrical socket… after getting whirled around in a tornado. Or you could just say he looked like the guy from Dragonball Z. Either way, you get the picture.

“Yeah, as much as I pine to be the author of randomly typed manuscripts, I think I’ll give it a bit more thought,” I teased, holding down the backspace button.

Then the piercing caw of a crow shrieked in my ear, “Why’d you delete that? You had something written.” Oh wait, it was the sub. Man, her voice was high pitched. It was as shrill as the blaring fire alarm. I marveled at it for a second. “Ahem, ahem,” she coughed like Umbridge, straight out of a Harry Potter novel, “I said, why did you erase what you had?”

“Oh…” I mumbled, “I umm… just didn’t like what I had.”

“Well what was it?”

“It was uhh…” I stalled by turning back to the computer. Hurriedly I fingered the keys to form a sentence. I was sitting at the computer, trying to think of an idea. “There,” I explained, showing her my cover up. “That’s all I had.”

“Come with me.” Gulp. I felt like I had been pushed off a tight rope. It’s not like hadn’t been making an effort; I was working harder than Bob the Builder to find the perfect subject to write my personal narrative about. But I just didn’t have good balance, and after a few precarious steps I was bound to topple over and be sent spiraling to the ground. Wasn’t I? The sub (I think her name was Mrs. R?) lead me to a menacing, round table away from everyone else and took a seat, staring at me like a judge scrutinizing his jury. “So, what’s the problem here?” she queried, taking on an even impossibly sharper tone.

“I can’t think of an event to write about.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure…” I trailed off. And I really wasn’t. The picture perfect topic was eluding me worse than the Gingerbread Man. Run, run, run as fast as I couldn’t seem to catch it. What was worse was that I was a cross-country runner. I certainly should be able to catch it. And then it me. Running! I could easily write about that. But which race? Different images of courses and finish lines flashed like a kaleidoscope through my head. There was my first scoring race in 6^th grade, or 7^th grade Big 11 finals when mounds of snow blanketed the ground. Then there was also the two races I’d won in 8^th grade and all the varsity High School races I’d run so far. But none of them felt right. How had they individually affected me? The Great Pyramids didn’t pop up over night. They took hundreds of years, brick upon brick, to construct. But remove one stone, and the whole monument would still come crashing down like a Janga tower. That’s how I felt about my meet. I couldn’t just write about one; it had to be all. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

“I see you’re a runner,” screeched Mrs. R, pointing at my bright pink track tee. “Why don’t you write about that?” Whoa. Déjà vu. Didn’t I just go through this? Maybe I should start saying my thoughts out loud.

“No, I don’t think that’ll work,” I replied vaguely. I knew what my problem was. I was too much of a perfectionist. I’d been fighting it for the majority of my life. But this time I was stepping out of the ring. I had this specific vision in my head and nothing else would, nothing else could satisfy me.

“What about a sibling being born?”

“I really don’t remember that”

“Life threatening injury?”

“Never so much as broken a bone.”

“Any vacations…” Okay, this was getting ridiculous. I knew in my heart only I could unearth the solution I was looking for. This sub was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and even worse was that mine was needle thin. I needed to locate that needle. Unfortunately, it seemed to be stuck in a haystack. One I could only search if this old bird stopped talking and let me get to work. Really, I appreciated that she was trying to help, but I was done playing around.

“Brilliant idea! I think I’ll write about that!”

“Write about what?”

“…What you just suggested!” I called, already taking off back towards my seat. Expecting to see my screen angel white again, I was surprised to find the cursor winking at me from a couple lines down the page. I was sitting at the computer, trying to think of an idea, when I discovered the cure for cancer and the meaning of life…Then I woke up. “Funny Brian,” I chortled as I glanced him guffawing next to me. As my life could morph so quickly, so instantaneously into something exciting. I couldn’t think of one lifelong highlight that had changed me, how could it suddenly change now? Change… My laugh cut off like someone had shoved a dirty dishrag in my mouth and I paused like a deer in headlights. The needle was change. Because I was wrong. Or that is, my perception was. It wasn’t that anything in my life hadn’t had the capability to change me drastically; it was that I just hadn’t let individual periods affect me. I was never a person who liked change, as I said before I was a perfectionist. Change was like sweeping a broom beneath my feet, ruining everything I had worked so hard to establish. That’s why I let each race I ran slowly build inside me. That’s why my experiences ran together over long periods of time. My outlook had established steel bars against change inside my mind. But at some moment I had to realize change was good. Now was my moment. If I didn’t like my hair, I could easily pick up a pair of scissors and cut it, giving me a whole new confidence. And without even blinking I could speak the words to a secret burning inside of me. Words that could set me free. At this moment I was opening myself up to a whole knew world of change and by doing this, change was happening inside me already. Without a minute to waste, I spun my fingers across the keyboard as I slid into my seat. I typed quickly, the rhythmic clicking like music to my ears.

“What’s going on Tori?” asked Christian, peering effortlessly over my shoulder because of his height.

“I’m threading the needle.”