LD, BP, and I were writing without thinking “why?” It was something we had to do – To get through the day, the moment – To put something down – To get by.
We invented the Survival Kits. LD and I carried around a second bag to class each day, filled with markers and papers and photos and widgets that, in a way, helped us breathe. We convinced the high school powers-that-be to let us invent an independent study after a term of creative writing. We taught a lesson or two, but what I remembered best is that we sat to the side of the students who took the class officially, with our SARK books and Sarah McLachlan lyrics.
BP’s survival kit, besides his pencil and paper, was outside. He would just go when he needed to. LD and I tried to put our stuff on paper (or collages or plastic fish mailers) and release it to the world, and BP’s was already out there.
I could not have gotten through high school without these two, and could not have made the survival kits that I’ve so desperately needed to dive into sometimes, and desperately need to just have the act of creating them help me at other times in the years that followed. What the three of us put together during our senior year of high school led to knowing that I can depend on the act of creativity, and its production, to get by, even if for one breath to the next.
Superheros through and through.
superfabulousgettingby 