Words

The blank sheet of paper seemed to stare back at me. This was without doubt the worst homework I’d ever gotten. “What’s important to you in five hundred words.”

Five hundred damn words that I’m sure my classmates will be toiling over describing their friends and family. I value words far too much to gloss over my everyday life in that way. Along that thought, I find the answer to my assignment. What do I find important?

Words.

I hardly have the friends for it, and my family doesn’t influence me the way words do. Since I was young, books have guided my mind, provoking my thought far more than movies and television. As soon as I could read without pictures I was jumping into the classics.

I learned a lot as I grew up, only a fraction from school. I owe it to books for opening my mind so much that my thoughts wandered where they would, something that society shuns during education but celebrates when it entertains. For that reason I won’t be giving five hundred words. Why should I waste them?

Five hundred words for what, an assignment? To be unappreciated in their composition, to be ignored for what they said, only acknowledged that there are five hundred of them before being given a “grade” and returned. And from there where will they go? No doubt a garbage can, for they served their purpose.

Well I choose not to continue the senseless abortion of life that words offer. One assignment after another, schools continue to fuel their concentration camps of creativity in their wholesale slaughter of language and imagination.

So no, I’m not completing this assignment by the school’s standards, since no teacher is completing mine. But at its core, it’s about what’s important to me, and the answer is simply, words.