Feeling: nostalgic
Listening to: Fleetwood Mac - Landslide
Reading/Watching: Gore Vidal. Now he's a card.

This is for Ampersand, and the new topic is "The ocean you left."

I've always said I'm a country girl at heart. I love open fields, wild grass, plenty of air to breathe and a place to sing at the top of my lungs where no human being will hear. Where I got such a hankering for the hills, I don't know, but I still get childishly excited about skies full of stars.

There is no way I could spend the remainder of my life in a smoggy city, without stars, as I did for the first 20 years, growing up in a city of four million people, attending a highschool of four thousand students. My graduating class was 710 people. The ceremony took three hours, stripped down to the bare minimum with two five-minute speeches and a militaristic list of people's names. Each graduate got three seconds after their name was called for family members to scream their lungs out from the stands before it was the next person's turn. There were 150 people in choir. 200 people in theater. Our literary magazine featured upwards of 80 authors and artists. I felt insignificant, since despite any and all accomplishments, there was always someone out there who was better. It was a huge, competitive ocean of humanity, and I learned a lot, like how to push myself, how to climb to peak performance, and how to accept it when I couldn't get any higher and there were still people who could one-up me.

People asked me why I chose my current school for college. Classmates my senior year were headed to schools like Rice, Columbia, Harvard, and of course UT, TA&M, SWT. I was the only one headed for a little Catholic school in the center of the state that boasted 2500 undergrads on a good year. I wasn't even sure myself, except I found it on a college search engine and it looked pretty. Then I visited, and somehow, it wasn't terrifying. All the other places I applied scared the life out of me, but here, I didn't feel so lost. The choral music director, Laurel, after hearing my audition, sat down and talked with me for half an hour about singing. Not scholarships or future careers, just music, and how much we both loved it. The honors program president interviewed me for the scholarship, and then asked about my novel, and gave my mom and I a tour around campus. One girl complimented me on my hair when I walked on campus, and then remembered my name when I bumped into her again later in the day.

It was an absolute pond, compared to my highschool, but I loved it. I wasn't so crowded, generalized, overshadowed. I could breathe. Maybe I just liked the attention, I don't know. I think maybe I needed it, since before that, everything in my life had been on a bigger scale. Three siblings, fifteen uncles and aunts, forty-one first cousins. I was always someone's something. I was never just me.

And suddenly I got here, and I stopped being a sister, a daughter, a niece, a cousin. I was Katie.

It was weird, how having people really notice when I did something well, made me work even harder to keep impressing them. It was the opposite of what my parents had worried about. I don't even feel pressured about it; it's nice when I tell a joke that makes someone laugh, because no one's beat me to it. I like hearing myself sing in choir. I like teachers who never call me by my sister's name. I like meeting people who don't know what I looked like in fourth grade, but will remember my face next time they see me.

Of course, there are some drawbacks. Three years here is beginning to take its toll. This school is, after all, rather insulated from the outside world, so that I'm beginning to forget the oceans that are still out there. It's very easy to be the big fish in a puddle, when the others are swimming a sea far away, and I know it's going to slap me in the face again when I graduate.

The only thing is, I feel ready. I have enough memory of what it was like, fighting so hard to be near the top without ever reaching it, that it's not going to be such a shock when I get out into the big bad world and there are opera divas who can sing circles around me. I know they're out there. But right now I'm building my confidence, training in the little pond, so I can feel ready to stand up to them when the day comes.

So I can fight for my place in line as Katie, instead of Somebody's Something. Practicing in the pond, I'll find the heart to swim the ocean.

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