With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

College Essay: First Draft

My father’s name is Julio. And like the warm-weather month he’s named after, he comes to visit once a year.

My grandmother says that my father couldn’t handle being a single parent after my mother died. That before that, my mother kept him in check, but he’d had an itch under his skin to return to his island. My grandmother and grandfather moved when he was only fourteen, and they say he didn’t adjust easily to the cold, the English, the way these streets were run so different from his own.

My grandmother chose to raise me when my father settled me onto her lap, asking her to watch me for a while, and then left the hospital. “A while” became seventeen years. It was in that exchange of my body from his hands to hers that the entire course of my life changed.

People say that you’re stuck with the family you’re born into. And for most people, that’s probably true. But we all make choices about people. Who we want to hold close, who we want to remain in our lives, and who we are just fine without. I choose not to dwell on my father’s rotating-door style of parenting, and instead reflect on my grandmother’s choice to not only bring me home from the hospital and raise me, but also to offer me a fighting chance.

The world is a turntable that never stops spinning; as humans we merely choose the tracks we want to sit out and the ones that inspire us to dance.