Creative Writing: I Almost Nothing To Do With My Memoir

Meera Rajeev, Bell 1, A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming.

Lessons from My Memoir that Have Almost Nothing to Do with My Memoir

The ocean. What do you sea? (Get it? Sea? Okay, I’m done.)

What I mentally painted as a child was really simple: an untroubled sea, with its loving crystal-blue waves foaming and rippling unhurriedly, bringing all the children on a tropical beach their very own conch shell.

But that image was based on nothing more than a couple of photoshopped Google images. My childhood wanderlust only consisted of traveling from my bed to my couch to my dining table and back to my couch, making me live vicariously through the TV or computer.

But when I was 13, I finally-- finally -- got to go to an ocean.

3… 2… 1…

Have you ever come across a moment where your entire childhood fantasy is a lie?

It was at that moment when I realized the ocean’s true power and masked might. The stunning beauty of the tiny, vibrant yellow Sergeant Major fish and the emerald-green sea corals only only hid the fact that a single wave can drown me. The creatures-- especially the Sergeant Major -- could attack me, hurt me, eat me.

I could die.

While I had only realized this power at the “mature” age of 13, Doaa has seen through the deception ever since she was a little girl. And she never got over her fear of it, not even as an adult, until she was forced to face it. But she didn’t face it through something as simple as snorkeling. No, she faced it through something much

1. “‘We can’t stop doing what we love.”’

Instead of being compliant and shy, she was headstrong and assertive. Instead of wanting to be a housewife, she wanted to finish high school and be a policewoman. Instead of ignoring her country’s fight for freedom, she was a rebel herself.

Even when it meant her family and herself would have to cross their war-infested city to reach their grandfather’s house for a holiday, Doaa went on and convinced her family to go, saying “we can’t stop doing what we love”.

Unlike most people-- unlike me, a girl who isn’t even willing to go against her mother’s daily clothing recommendations-- Doaa refused to back down to the oppressive standards she faced. She refused to be a shadow of herself. Instead she did the unexpected.

She fought back with courage and made her life her own.

2. “‘They were greeted by another Syrian family at the house-- a husband, wife and four children, refugees like themselves with the determination to risk their lives for the hope of a future better than the limbo they lived in