Descriptive

Water

It takes its own aim. Travels wherever the path is open, devours whatever stands in its way. It’s what feeds the drought and swallows the rain. What fills the fallow crevices of the earth, what projects the blue of the sky. It blesses thirst but curses breath. Embodies unconstrained power.

Step inside where you’ll find yourself standing between life and death. Peer into the clear blue that embraces your bottom half, granting you grace in your movement. Your other half hovering above its surface, in a different time; a time that moves fast, ungraceful.

They approach you, arrive so close, then elapse into itself. Banished by the impeding shore. Bear witness to the changeless activity of the rolling waves. Watching water is like watching a single scene stuck on repeat for the ceaseless duration of eternity-just not as boring.

 

Expository

How To Become Famous

Want to reach Queen B’s level?

Step 1: Possess an outstanding talent that will outshine the other 7 billion human beings on the planet.

Step 2: Avoid Simon Cowell.

Step3: If it means wearing a 40-pound raw meat dress to the Grammies, be willing to go great lengths to get the attention of every reporter in Hollywood until your face grazes the cover of People magazine-one of the world’s top celebrity-gossip magazines.

Step 4: Get used to criticism and flashing lights.

Step 5: Remember that fame is a dish best served hot!

 

Persuasive

 

Do you want to build a snowman?

The snow has fallen, and you only see it as a great, white burden. But no one asked you to shovel your driveway-well maybe the city did and it’s also the only way to get to work in the morning, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Like blank paper, snow is white and waiting for you to create something out of it. Why put it aside into towering banks that risk avalanching onto your driveway at the rev of an engine, when you can accumulate every last bit into a big, smiley man of snow? One who reminds your entire neighborhood how to have fun, and well, to smile! Give life to the snow, or has it fallen for nothing? Make it big, or does snow’s abundance bear no purpose? Even if your the man of the house, expected to shovel the driveway just to get the heavy job done-go ahead, build a snowman, I won’t judge.

 

Narrative

When I was little, I visited this old man in Sri Lanka. He returned the favor a few years later, but because he was finally blessed with the birth of a grandchild. Unfortunately, the child arrived at a time when all the old man’s young years of overdrinking and addiction showed signs of catching up. He fell sick and was soon hospitalized. The doctors found in his body exactly what they expected for a man with as many records of intoxication and alcohol abuse as he to have. This is what they dreaded, because then the only thing they could tell him was to “go home, spend your last days with the people you love, it’ll be shortly now”. And even when he’d be home, he wouldn’t fully be there. His abilities would gradually demur, his senses would slowly diminish, and he would fall in and out of consciousness. Death would be too close for the family, but too far for him.

The next time I visited him, he was undernourished, nearly skeletal. His skin was probably paper thin, a single layer and then immediate bone. His belly stuck out about 2 feet from his chest, filled with nothing but water. The sheets missed his feet and I witnessed the decaying crust on his toes. One of his hands rested on the pillow, the other clasping his head. His eyes were drained of their color, murky pupils staring off into the distance, right passed my face. I watched in sorrow, hovering over the old man that was not really there anymore. Just that toxic mass, lying on a bed he couldn’t get up from.