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. 

Dark defiance

Darkness had fallen heavily on the village, like fresh snow sent from the devil himself. A serene silence filled the cool summer air, and all was peaceful and calm. The birds rested patiently whilst the village slept. With the morning sun would come their morning songs.

A loud note broke the silence as surely as an axe through thick winter ice. One bird could not wait. He sang, his head tilted towards the black sky, his chest puffed out in pride. He threw his wings out behind him and sang from his rooftop; calling again and again and again. The other birds looked out from under their sleepy wings in horror and disbelief, watching this little creature so brazenly defy the rules.

Lights were starting to go on in the houses. The little bird had woken everybody up. One grumpy man in his pajamas spotted the bird and huffed; so this was the thing that was making all the noise. He picked up stones and flung them roughly at the roof, the first few missing, but the last one striking the bird, knocking him. He lost his balance and fell, shocked with the pain and the cruelty, but he remembered himself and flew upwards just before he hit the ground.

Gingerly resuming his perch, the bird watched the man victoriously stroll back inside, and he sang one last mellow note before quietening. His head faced the floor and not the sky, and his wings had drooped by his sides. The other birds turned away and went back to sleep, bemused by the whole event, and the little bird who dared to sing in the dark flew up and away into the night alone, unnoticed by anyone.