Ctrl + B Page 15
Is it cool that I said all that?
Is it chill that you’re in my head?
’Cause I know that it’s delicate
I wonder if the guys relate. I wonder if they’re okay with never experiencing those fragile romantic beginnings with someone again. They’re probably wondering the same thing. Otherwise, though, in many ways, the novices could be any group of millennial dudes, listening to music and even drinking craft beers—Shaun’s mom signed them up for a Beer of the Month club, which, they clarify, doesn’t violate the vow of poverty.
GYANA GUITY
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: University Heights High School
BORN: Bronx, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Girls Write Now has been one of the greatest opportunities I could ever experience. I was so glad to be paired with you, Sarah, and you don’t know how relieved I was when I found out how well we worked together. Girls Write Now did an amazing job at pairing their mentees and mentors, and it honestly feels like you are the most perfect mentor I could have. I really like how much I have learned about writing with your help. I can’t wait to spend even more time with you and teach you more about K-pop each week.
SARAH GOUDA
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Speechwriter, Fenway Strategies
BORN: Cincinnati, OH
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published in Teen Vogue, Gothamist, Lenny Letter
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Gyana makes being a mentor easy. Before I met her, I was really nervous that I might have trouble connecting with my mentee or that I would encounter a situation I wouldn’t know how to handle. But Gyana is one of the most driven, confident, and brilliant people I’ve ever met—and that’s including all the adults in my life! I am so impressed by her ambition and how she stays true to herself above all else. I’ve learned so much from her.
To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before
GYANA GUITY
This is a piece dedicated to thanking my friends for changing my life and making me a better person. They have taught me how to be bold and brave.
Junior year has been a wild mess. There have been many nights where I thought about everything I’ve experienced, everyone I’ve met. And there have been even more times where I didn’t know if the best thing to do was laugh or cry. My mind, even after so many years, is still something I can’t quite comprehend. I’ve trusted myself to make the best decisions for every single situation, but never understood why my friends and family labeled me as a bold and confident girl. I was the girl who was fearless and crazy, capable of doing anything and everything she wanted. I always had the loudest laugh, the deranged ideas, and a huge smile on my face as I lead everyone around me to paradise and fun: a Broadway show where I was the main star.
But behind that, there was another side of me that didn’t understand the slightest idea about being bold and proud. She was afraid of the world and everything in it, and all the time, she wanted to hide. The Gyana I let people see is real, believe me, that girl isn’t an illusion, a fake. But the reason why she exists, and manages to stand tall and live boldly in front of everyone she loves, is because of all of her friends, her family, and all of the love they surround her with. I never know how to thank them, how to explain to them how grateful I am to have them, so I thought that by writing this, they could see.
Lizbeth, thank you for all of the long and fun nights you’ve spent with me. You have been the person I have always gone to when I needed comfort, and even though we can both be awkward when one of us is down or upset, we still always find a way to cheer up the other. Thank you for always answering the phone even when you’re busy and being patient with me when all I can do is cry on the other end of the phone. Thank you for all of the BTS memes you sent to make me burst out laughing and smile, and lastly, thank you so much for introducing me to K-pop. Marielisa, I am so glad we were able to meet and grow close. I love being a goofball around you and making you laugh with my weird and random jokes. Thank you for the advice you give me when I feel lost, even when I sometimes choose not to listen. Abena, thank you for bearing with me. I always felt like you have been able to handle me best when I’m feeling moody, and you never listen to me when I tell you to leave me alone. Deep down, somewhere inside, we both know that I never want to be left alone, but I am just too stubborn to say it. Thank you for constantly reminding me that you were going to be there for me at all times and showing me the true definition of friendship. Yadyvic and Amanda, you don’t know how great it feels to be close with you. Talking with other people who are just as passionate about writing as I am. I go to you both whenever I’m stuck with my writing and need help with ideas or simply expressing my thoughts. You two are really supportive when it comes to my writing, and you don’t know how relieved I feel to hear other people, especially my friends, enjoying my writing. There have been countless times where I hated the way I wrote and debated if it was even worth being a writer. But you both keep me going. I can’t thank you enough. Jadah, you are literally one of the most precious human beings in the world. It warms my heart when you see me every morning and scream my name and run to hug me. You mean the world and more to me, and I’m so glad we’re friends again. I didn’t know I would hate it so much to suddenly stop talking to you during sophomore year because our classes were switched, but it feels so good to have you back.
I love all of you so much, and don’t know what my life would be like without you all. If you thought I forgot about you, think again. Tonya, Jennifer, and Hanna. Chiara, Ariana, and Tiana, thank you so much for also being in my life. I always wish I could pull you all in a tight hug and tell you how much I love you, and one day I hope I do, each and every last one of you. All of you guys, my lovely friends and family, you are the reason why I am the Gyana you all talk with and love today. There’s no me without all of you, and I want to keep you all in my life forever. You have each helped me when I was at my lowest and appreciated me for who I was. To everyone here, thank you. I love you.
Best Friends, Forever.
SARAH GOUDA
Gyana’s beautiful tribute to her friends inspired me to examine the relationships that have made me who I am.
On my last Amtrak trip, the boy seated behind me kicked my chair in frustrated excitement. He was trying to describe something indescribable, about another boy in his kindergarten class, to his distracted father. Finally, he settled on: “It’s like every time I’m with him I get this feeling, like, ‘Wow! Wow, you’re my best friend.’ ”
I could relate. How can you ever explain why you just choose some people? It’s beyond conscious thought, as is the sweet, solid understanding that they, of course, were always going to choose you back. Maybe it’s not even a choice, more of an obvious inevitability. I’ve been lucky enough to find the sort of friends that feel like destiny at nearly every juncture in my life. There was Marc, whose eyes rolled in tandem with mine when our study hall teacher made a corny joke. Antoinette, my sophomore year roommate and most patient confidante, who deserves an award for putting up with my messes in the many kitchens we shared through our twenties. And Molly—the girl who looked as terrified as me the first day of our study-abroad program, and whose wedding she recently demanded I attend, despite our intermittent at best communication in the intervening years. Some bonds can withstand our own neglect.
Gyana’s beautiful tribute to her friends made me think of the ones that populated my own life at that age. It’s impossible to consider my high school experience without considering Brittany, my best friend, who renders the words “best friend” insufficient. We had the kind of friendship that not every teen girl has, but only teen girls can have. One brain split across two bodies. Inseparable, annoying to anyone else in the room, and desperate to deny any differences between us. There was so much safety in being a unit. The hierarchies of high school didn’t matter to me once I melded
with Brittany—we existed on our own plane, our only interest in making the other laugh. Of course it couldn’t last.
I used to think that the marker of true friendship was its longevity. Can it stand the test of time? But the other day I caught myself lilting my voice the way Brittany used to when she was flirting with a boy. Hand on her hip, playfully asking, “Can I tell you something interesting?” An unnecessary question, a trick for pulling people toward her. I’m sure I’ve used it countless times, without thinking, since Brittany and I last spoke. And it always works: giving me a chance to pause, a moment to remind myself that I’m worth paying attention to. What more lasting of a gift can you ask for than that?
GIANNY GUZMAN
YEARS AS MENTEE: 3
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Academy of American Studies
BORN: Long Island, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Hermione is my mentor, friend, and on occasion my therapist. Our relationship consists of coffee, books, talks, city trips, and everything in between. Hermione has helped me become the writer and person I am today. She never lets me give up on myself or my writing, while supporting me through every struggle. I love writing and I love reading, but sometimes life gets in the way, but Hermione never lets me forget my passions or to hone my skills for myself.
HERMIONE HOBY
YEARS AS MENTOR: 3
OCCUPATION: Novelist and Critic
BORN: Beckenham, London
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: First novel, Neon in Daylight, was a two-time New York Times Editors’ Choice; regular bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: One of the greatest things about being Gianny’s mentor is the way in which her writing always surprises and delights me; she’s never predictable as a writer, and that helps me keep trying to render the world in fresh ways. When we first began our mentor-mentee relationship, Gianny said she hated poetry: How satisfying, then, to see her now blossoming as a poet!
Glass
GIANNY GUZMAN
Ctrl + B is owning who you were, are, and want to be. It’s about being bold for yourself. I wrote “Glass” as a way to embrace my past while owning and being unapologetically proud of who I am and who I am choosing to become.
My dear, It seems to have slipped your mind, Our friendship was pulled from the ashes of our flames. My, why, I think we were meant to burn, We survived only to be left behind, forged into glass. My, dear They cannot judge you nor I, We were young, The kind of young that throws you into life with blind eyes.
Did you forget the people we had to become? The way we had to change? The souls we had to scrape away. Until we were people the other did not want to know.
My dear, Did you forget? Glass people don’t get seen They are looked through, They are never looked at. They become who you meet before the next one. If only, We saw ourselves. Maybe, We wouldn’t have cracked each other, To try and be seen. If only I knew you saw me and I saw you, But let’s be honest my dear Neither was enough for the other. Every crack on my glass soul, I blamed on you. When we both had shards of glass piercing our hearts. And we ended up slipping in each other’s cracks.
Our whole lives fueled on fire in our personalized hells It’s where we found each other. We thought we were numb, so we couldn’t get burned. But we weren’t the exception to the scarring.
Oh, my dear, how we tried, To heal the cracks by forging glass with fire. Only to burn the remaining ties we had to one another, The ones we needed so direly. Only to cover up the missing cracks, To cover up what needed to be healed. I lay a hand on my heart and I can still feel the broken glass.
Ignoring each other Didn’t change what we did We turned to glass, we broke open cracks and left it in the past.
What happened between you and I?
I loved you and you I. In the way we thought love was, In the way we thought love would treat us, Oh, my, we were never close.
I blamed you for every crack in our friendship made of glass. You blamed me for being glass flickering to iron When you couldn’t. We blamed the fire we could not escape from. We never blamed ourselves.
Oh, my dear, if you could see me now, I do not flicker to iron I do not share my fire And I learned. Glass can break, that will never change, But I see my every crack and As we always dreamed to be, I am not fragile.
It’s time my dear, To say the words we never spoke. We were never meant to be but made sure we were. Goodbye my dear old friend. We both deserve more.
Extract from Small Gods
HERMIONE HOBY
This is taken from my second novel, Small Gods, in which Luca, dying as an old man in the year 2074, recalls 2017, a year that came to define his life.
I’m looking at the Twombly book again, at one of the white paintings, which isn’t the white of these sheets, this ceiling, or any other white I can see in this small sterile cube that’s draining my sons’ modest inheritance, but a living, talking, white. A conversational white. I remember a story that I’d forgotten, and it’s so much sweeter and more astonishing for having been forgotten then retrieved. Like a fifty-dollar bill in an old winter coat, or, better than that, let’s not bring money into this, because that’s the point, isn’t it, literal pricelessness, or, rather, something beyond money. Nonquantifiable currency.
In Avignon, in 2007, a French woman stood before one of these white paintings, maybe even this very one I’m staring at in reproduction, whereupon she was so overcome with passion that she kissed the canvas—pressed her moist and lipsticked mouth right up against the whiteness and left her mark there. She called it an act of love. “I stepped back,” she was quoted in newspapers. Or at least, these were the words translated from the French. I’m sure they were more beautiful in the French, everything is. “I found the painting even more beautiful,” she went on. “The artist left this white for me.” Imagine the delusion and rapture of believing a priceless painting to be a canvas left for you! I envy her terribly. I’m trying to embody that solipsism, specifically the moment of stepping back. I want to feel her ecstasy of consummation, which in everyone else’s eyes was vandalism. Funny that news reports used the word “defaced,” when in fact she gave it a face, or at least, a mouth—that stamp of red, parted lips, a mark of desire, ravishment. She was apprehended soon after, the red stain remained. I can’t remember if she was charged or not, and I prefer not to know. I still can’t imagine kissing a painting. It seemed to me then, as it still does now, a wildly romantic act, a wilder shore of love. What if I were to kiss this page? To bring this heavy book up to my face and press my dry lips against the high gloss page? I’d be a bad actor, pathetic.
I didn’t understand Paula’s paintings. I could tell you this—they were large and abstract and the brushstrokes tended to be fat and crosshatched. Sometimes they struck me as vibrant, dizzying. Beyond that, I don’t really know. When I saw them for the first time, in real life I mean, rather than the Google Image mosaic of them on a web browser, I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if saying something stupid and wrong would be worse than saying nothing at all. Please remember, I was so young. The truth is, the paintings seemed to me accents for the studio itself, which was so much more readily enchanting than the works within. The bursts of wildflowers in glass jars, the rugs on the floor laid at angles, the table of animal skulls, a fire-engine-red Anglepoise lamp, its head bowed to a prettily cluttered desk in an attitude of tender attention. Even the most utilitarian corners—the stacks of blank canvases or shelves of paint—looked suggestive with possibility. Wooden crates of ’70s soul and ’80s pop and the old yet functioning record player which legitimized them. All the postcards from traveling friends sending love and witticisms and exclamation points from Rome and Istanbul and Quintana Roo. The handwritten notes of thanks or congratulation in large, confident scripts, pinned to things. Boxes of treasures everywhere, her own world of Joseph Cornells.
This, to me, seemed like the greater artwork: Paula’s life, the way her life looked. The style of her life.
LENA HABTU
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Freshman
HIGH SCHOOL: Ethical Culture Fieldston School
BORN: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: In my time with Sammi, we’ve worked on practical things, such as editing and dialogue, but my fondest memory was when we found a shared passion. I’d been itching to write a piece on immigration, and we decided to work simultaneously. I was in awe of her eloquence, as well as the quiet strength and resilience of her piece.
SAMMI LABUE
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Founder and Leader, Fledgling Writing Workshops
BORN: Moorpark, CA
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Sammi’s Fledgling Writing Workshops named one of the best writing classes in NYC by Time Out
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I often misspeak, calling Lena my mentor rather than my mentee. Maybe it’s because since our first meeting, her ambition has been contagious. The way she talks about storytelling is like solving a puzzle. I love to see her wheels turn when she snaps together the pieces. In those moments she reminds me of my young self, who was most at home in my own imagination. She so clearly has a writer’s mind and a wisdom and strength beyond her years to back it. No matter who’s teaching whom, I feel lucky to be a part of our little team.
Song in the Silence
LENA HABTU & SAMMI LABUE
Maya Angelou supposedly said people reveal themselves when faced with: “a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.” This collaborative piece, inspired by Maya’s quote, is about finding joy despite our disappointments.