One Day I Saw A Rainbow

A Story By 8th Grade Bryan

July 8, 2020StoryShare

I recently went through my old Google Drive and found this piece I wrote in 8th grade. I had completely forgotten about this, but reading it totally put a smile on my face, and I felt compelled enough to share. I hope you enjoy. (Scroll to the end for my thoughts!)

One Day I Saw A Rainbow

Time waits for no one. It flows like a river downhill, past all of the ridges in a mountain and cracks in the soil, only to be carried back up to the top to repeat – and inevitably traveling towards a place that it has already visited time and time again. It progresses in fashions that nobody really understands, and acts in manners that even given an eternity to study, we will never be able to fully comprehend. But the complexingly simple and single truth that stands, is that it waits for nobody. 

One day I saw a rainbow. It wasn’t the type you’d see after a rainy shower, stretching its big, colorful wings across the damp sky, but the type you’d see reflecting through the glass of a window and sitting there on your window sill. A small collection of reds, blues, greens, yellows, and purples that accentuated every aspect of the bland room; the vase of flowers of a bright white, the peeling curtains of a beige complexity, and a few books of varying, faded colors that laid upon the cracked surface. The rainbow’s presence added something peculiar to the environment – aside from the sheer beauty of the many shades that it boasted, it gave off a certain feeling. To describe it, like the first stroke of a paintbrush on an empty and sad canvas, that yearned for the opportunity to be something greater than it was. 

But just like that, as the clouds drifted across the sky, the rainbow that had once stretched across the window sill that I’d rested my elbow on when I was sad or gloomy or depressed, ceased to exist. 

Another time it was a butterfly. The crisp, morning air had already permeated the inside of my apartment, and along with its infiltration was a butterfly. It was perched upon the outer brick wall of my apartment. I said to my sister,

“Come check this out! There’s a butterfly outside!” But she paid no mind, already deeply invested into her artisanal work – the art of a PB&J sandwich. Like the rainbow, I knew that things like this – that is, the mundane and yet oddly fashioned beauties that we discover throughout our everyday lives, do not last long. The world will never be in this exact position again, for in a few seconds or so the butterfly would eventually take flight and fly away, and in accordance with this, my sister was bound to drop her newly-fashioned sandwich. 

Sometimes the most enjoyable and yet simple things that we come to love are found in the nooks and crannies that are often seceded behind the neon lights and fads of “today.” But just to look back and admire what is there, what was there, and what is going to come amounts to much more than just observing the river that flows downhill – the river that pays no mind to the small moments and rainbows that we witness, the river whose only intention is to do one thing: to move forward.

Everybody knows that rainbows don’t last forever. They come and go, like clouds in the sky, or like a Massachusetts subway car that roars in from one end of the tunnel and out the other. But for the small, elapsed period of time that they are here, we should always embrace them, and keep that memory to be remembered on another day when we’re feeling desperate or in need of help. In that time, we will say to ourselves with assurance, hope, dignity, and confidence: “One day, I saw a rainbow.”

Five Years Later

One of the things I think is true is that my writing style has become more formulaic and structured over the years. When I was in middle school, I used to write fictional stories for fun (a few over 10,000 words), and I was really impressed with the sense of freedom and adventure with which I wrote.

Maybe this is because I wasn't as aware of any of the rules to writing as I am now. These days, I'm haunted whenever I spot a megablunder in my own writing; I over-obssess when it comes to using em-dashes vs. semicolons vs. periods for continuity's sake; I spend more time than I should reading sentences in my head and out loud, making decisions about diction that are inconsequential in the long-term.

When I was in middle school, I just wrote. Sure, it wasn't flawless. There are definitely moments where it was clear that I cared more about "sounding" sophisticated rather than "being" sophisticated. I probably could've cut down on the purple prose.

But what I really appreciate about this writing—this snapshot from 8th grade Bryan's imagination—is that it is authentically me, unmistakably me, writing during a time in my life when I was writing for nobody else but myself, and nothing else but the joy that came with telling a story of my own creation.

I think I ought to do more of that.