the rainbow

It was somewhere in a kindergarten classroom, between glue sticks missing their caps and sticky alphabet posters, that I became a writer.

The first story I ever wrote was five pages long—though ‘pages’ might be generous. They were sheets of white paper folded and stapled together by the pudgy hands of a five-year-old who didn’t know how to tie her shoelaces but was absolutely certain that rainbows were tangible.

I remember sitting at the tiny red table, gripping a fat Crayola marker as if it were a wand. My letters were shaky, my drawings even more so—bold blocks of color lining the sky, a lopsided rainbow stretched over a crooked village. In my story, the village was famous for the rainbow that arched overhead all year round. Tourists came, postcards were printed, the villagers had no time to be kind. They were busy and important and perpetually irritated.

Then one day, the rainbow shattered. It split into pieces and scattered across the village like glass in a storm. And suddenly, the people who had stopped smiling had to talk to each other. They had to share glue and climb rooftops, pass each other pieces of sky-blue and violet. In putting the rainbow back together, they somehow fixed themselves, too.

It was the first time I made something entirely my own. No prompts, no dotted lines to trace over. Just me, a stapler, and a story.

I remember holding it up in front of the class, too mortified to read it aloud as my teacher ushered me forward. In the end, she read it for me. I watched from behind her chair, red-faced, heart racing—but something clicked. I couldn’t say much out loud back then. I hated the sound of my voice in a room full of people. But I had found something better: a way to speak without speaking.

Now I’m seventeen. I still hate giving speeches. I still like markers. And I still write, though I’ve swapped Crayola for keyboards and rainbows for more tangled things: friendships, silence, longing, language. But every time I sit down to write, it feels a little like that first time—nervous, excited, like I’m picking up broken colors and trying to make sense of them.

That story is stuck in a drawer somewhere, frayed and faded. But the smudged rainbow stuck with me long after I’d scrubbed its residue from my hands. It was how I began to understand the world, and how I found out how to let the world understand me.