Jack, Jake and the Lake

He soared with his wings wild and wide, whistling in the wind and wavering above the wintry waters. The frozen hands of Jack had touched the lake below, and with a weary white face it offered up no break from the fall. The span of the once watery surface was acres and acres, and Jake flew for his life. The wind still tried to take him down, to be crushed against the ice, to be blood on snow with broken bones. He shook and looped as clouds covered his view, and his heart cascaded to the depths of his internal reality. He descended like a dart, dropped from the heavens, damned to death by the Gods above.

Down he went, the wind acting like the ice, breaking into his skin and freezing his blood, stopping his organs and grinding them to a fearful halt. They no longer sloshed but crunched, a noise like metal on metal, like mechanical parts striking clunking cogs. The noise deafened him as still he fell, the world spinning, the white icy face coming closer, calamity upon calamity, he knew for certain he was set to die. Though he was entire three dimensional, he felt only like an unreachable ball of fiery emotion headed to the centre of the earth like a burning meteor, which would chomp through the surface as if it were mere cheese.

He blinked. Back in the sky, the wind held him. There was, there had been, no drop; he was flying as sturdily as ever. His gorgeous, glorious unrivalled white wings stayed true, as they had never failed to do. They felt not a part of him, but a part of the sky itself, as though the universe was holding him tightly. Perhaps that meant the universe could decide to drop him, if the wings were not his own, but for now he trusted in them and continued his courageous course. He smiled, for he was but more than emotion, more than fear, and more than a wreck upon the cold and stone like ground. He was more than even he knew, there in the hands of the world itself.

The snowy face of the lake lost that look of bleak weariness; Jake could see the love in its invisible eyes. Jake could see contrast. He could see science and he could see art. He could see death and life, love and hate, pain and happiness. He could see dark and light, fear and courage, anger and soft serenity. He could see it all. Perhaps to see is not to understand, for he understood not why he did not fall. But see he did, and fly he did, for joy, for tears, for the want of never knowing, for the want of never coming within the safety of the ground. 

Grades

And now I stand here, branded for life by letters which do not take into consideration circumstance or personality. This group of letters, collected together after years, will now stand to reflect my intelligence and my work ethic. They show what I can do. They show what I can’t do. They determine my future - they represent me. I will be left with these letters for life.

I feel these letters are like covers to novels. Sometimes, I’m sure they represent exactly what they’re supposed to. You see an A* cover, you open it, and there is the life of an A* student, there in black and white. But also, they can misrepresent. If you open the book, you may find things you never expected to. Behind a D grade student, there may be unspoken hardships you hadn’t anticipated, invisible broken relationships or pain that is unimaginable. There is no way to tell a person’s story with a simple letter. There is no way to pour humanity into a man made symbol, to whittle life down to a mere grade.

There is no other system. It has to be like this – there has to be some regime that evens everything out, ignores the majority of factors, and puts everyone in the same boat so that they are comparable to one another. I understand this, because this system makes up the fundamental backbone of our working society. But it still doesn’t make it any way right. When a kid is born into a working class family with six brothers and sisters and barely enough food to make it through the day gets bullied for five years because of his hand-me-down clothes, and then gets judged by the same letters as a middle class, well-educated only child whose only hardship in life was his iphone’s battery life – IS. THIS. FAIR?

Well, life’s not fair. But it’s not just to do with money and class. It’s to do with unforeseen situations and other factors which cannot be taken into consideration when they make that A or B, or C, or U official to everyone. Life is something we don’t understand – it is complicated beyond belief. We are beating hearts and blinking eyes, whirring brains and chattering teeth, and each of us splashes a path across the globe, interweaving with other paths and situations and events.  Words and memory spiral from this and history is made; emotions play their song. The future envelopes out in front of us….unknown, not understood, but we take steps towards it anyway because there is nothing else to do but trust. And yet, despite all this complicated craziness, this blast of bizarre brains brought together by some big bang, we label our letters. We reduce our lives down to such simplicity, that sometimes I think we miss the entire point of life itself. If there is a point indeed.

Some will think me bitter for writing this - would I be writing this if I'd got the grades I wanted? Perhaps not.  But it is not just for me that I pose this unwinnable argument. It is for all those people who got letters on their pieces of paper who feel they have a different story to one of laziness or stupidity. Whatever life is, it is more than that.