ORIGIN
I entered the Winter semester of 2020 with much excitement and hope for the future, fueled by a feeling of peak grandiosity. And I was especially thrilled to take my first course for the writing minor. As past periods of happiness have proven, these emotions were short-lived.
A mere nine days into 2020, I woke up to eight or more missed calls and dozens of texts on all platforms from my best friend, Ana, whom I met at the age of five. My stomach dropped as I immediately assumed something had happened to her parents.
I never expected to hear her tell me that our sister, Kassy, passed away unexpectedly in a tragic accident. And I thought the worst thing that could happen to me that Friday morning was waking up hungover. For the past thirteen years, the three of us have shared the most significant moments of our lives together, traveled together, and our families spent as many holidays as we could together. My entire childhood was spent with them, nearly all of my memories filled by their faces and laughter. I never imagined a future without either one of them in it. Especially not before finally escaping my teens.
Upon receiving the haunting news, the foundation beneath me caved and I spent the next days, weeks, and months to this day in a state of grief, out of tune with the world around me that quite frankly was moving much faster than I could even comprehend.
There is nothing more difficult than existing when the weight of the universe is placed upon your shoulders, dragging you into a lonely pit of darkness you wish to permanently move into. I don’t fully remember the first two months of the semester. When I look back, all I see is myself laying in my room in a green haze with swollen eyes, completely immobile, convinced that Kassy could receive my smoke signals from where ever she may be.
After over a week of solitude, I reluctantly had to return to "normal" life, often taking bathroom breaks in between and during classes to cry or fight a panic attack triggered by casual mentions of tragic accidents and death shared by classmates and professors who seemed oblivious to my present zombie state. Immediately following my return to classes, Julie, my gateway professor, assigned us to choose an origin piece to experiment in different genres with. I can still hear her voice announcing that we’d be spending the whole semester with this piece, so our choice should be deeply considered. With a single thing on my mind since the first week of the semester, I knew I had to choose a piece and topic so far from the only topic my mind could focus on.
I ended up choosing a poem I wrote about animal agriculture in my junior year of high school. Even then, it reminded me of Kassy and the time I motivated her to follow a plant-based diet with me when I started five years ago. In all honesty, there was nothing I could write about that wouldn’t remind me of her so this was my best bet.
I wrote ‘Human Agriculture’ with the intentions of presenting a sensitive topic with a playful tone, making it appear less severe than the reality of the story it presents in the same way that many meat-eaters try to present the abuse of animals for the mass exploitation of their products as “no big deal”. By focusing on this industrial tragedy of mankind, I was able to reduce the pressure on my heart in at least this one class. And thus was the deal, one tragedy for another.
