“What I’ll always remember most about my third-grade classroom is the rocking chair.”
Anna Sacchetti, a biologist by day and writer by night, describes the powerful magic of the storytelling seat.
She writes,
Unlike everything else in the classroom, that rocking chair was reserved for the teacher and the teacher alone. While more severe transgressions existed in elementary school culture, a transgression upon the rocking chair simply did not occur. It was the only rule not outlined on the first day of class and simultaneously the only rule to which everyone complied.
I envied my teacher so much every time she sat in that rocking chair—because every time she did, she was so acknowledged. From that position, only eighteen inches higher than our seated vantage on the floor, she mediated every discussion—every idea, word, or even movement was ventured under her direction. I most remember how she presided over our “share circles,” which were an opportunity for us to read our day’s writing pieces to the class.
I never get nervous when I present, but I remember how my hands shook, gripping my composition journal the very first time I volunteered to share. Maybe it was because, for the first time, I was sharing something that I had put a piece of my pride into. Per the instructions of my teacher, I had written a story about pilgrims—but rather than my piece being about a meal or falsified cooperation with natives, mine was about an insufferably foolish puritan.
My first inkling of self was when my classmates started to giggle, and I felt my confidence crescendo alongside their laughter. Maybe it was a higher call, or just a large dopamine rush, but I was hooked. In the writing periods that followed, I cranked out story after story, and the words came so easily. The words were cognate without me having to plan them in my head. The complex universes and individuals I created seemed to me as if they already existed—I was just communicating them.
My peers started to tell me that share circle was the most anticipated part of their day because they wanted to hear my stories. They sought my advice before they approached the teacher’s desk—they even asked me to feature them as characters in my stories. I was intoxicated by the feeling of their smiles, of the way my words made them laugh.
We were three months removed from my first story when my teacher offered me the rocking chair. It was the first time I can remember being acknowledged. I was someone who had no other talents other than schoolwork—I had dabbled in sports, drawing, piano, but never attained great success. But in writing I was unopposed; it was the elite superpower you would read about on my Pokemon card. Who I am crystallized in that moment—I wasn’t just a chatterbox, or an attention seeker, but a narrator. I was a storyteller.
When Anna entered middle school, she experienced a knock to her identity that began with a romance—the memory and influence of which haunts her to this day.
I fell in love on my trampoline. I was turning back flip after back flip, to the absolute awe of my first ever boy who was a friend. We were jumping in sync, he had mastered his takeoffs so that they launched me even higher off the trampoline’s surface, allowing me to “layout” and “full twist” at the heights a cartoon character is capable of reaching. It was a metaphor for how true friends aid you in being the best version of yourself—that feeling is how I define platonic love to this day.
I already cared for him more than I did most other people, but I fell in love with him when it was his turn to flip. He was strong, unusually tall for an eighth-grade boy, but he was also clumsy—I was fully expecting a cheerfails worthy backflip. Accordingly, and to my delight, he froze at the takeoff.
“Anna, I’m going to die,” he declared. “You know I’m kind of stupid—I’m gonna go off the side of the trampoline.”
This was an invitation to do what I do best—antagonize boys I have crushes on. “Are you scared you’re gonna lose your diabetes pump?” I taunted, “it’s not difficult, here, look, I’ll demonstrate.” I turned two in a row, you know, just to assert dominance. He wouldn’t budge. I turned to my other hidden ability—pathetic appeal. I interspersed some sniffles in with my “pleases,” and puppy dog eyes. I was fully expecting this conversation to go nowhere, when, in the middle of my whining, he did it. He rotated through the air, his knees hit the burning rubber, but he was still smiling when he got up to face me. I was anticipating a “happy now?” or a decisive “there,” but instead, I got a bamboozling, “what’s the next one you wanna teach me?”
“You actually wanna keep doing this?” I asked.
“Not really, but, you’re loving it, so its kinda fun dude.”
That was it! That was when I fell in love. I fell in love with how far he was willing to go for me. That day, he hadn’t just done a flip that scared him. The night before, I had forgotten to mute our FaceTime call, and through the phone in my back pocket, he had heard my dad screaming at me. He had come the next day, suffered the uncomfortable conversation with his mom about who his new friend was and missed summer league practice (little things that presented insurmountable challenge in the eighth grade) to remind me that someone cared. In the days that followed, he would engage in things he had never tried before— he listened to French pop music. He learned everything there was to know about cheerleading stunts and conversed with me about them fluently. He read my stories, and even sent me back some of his own (which weren’t very good, but he tried his best). He even wrote songs.
I haven’t met someone like that since.
Six months later, Anna experienced a crippling heartbreak.
After hundreds of calls, tenfold more “I love you’s” and walks to class where he’d held my hand (when no one was looking), that same boy told me that he couldn’t be with me, that we couldn’t even be friends anymore. I was bewildered. Only the day before, had had told me he wanted me to be his New Year’s kiss—why the sudden change? After all, wasn’t he the one who wanted me to be his girlfriend all of the sudden? He promised me we were going to hang out over winter break. He had assured me that this was gonna last forever. He asked to be my first…well, everything. To me, these actions weren’t just concrete; they were irrefutable. He was not allowed to take back all the things he said on a whim.
I asked him why and expected an excuse, like that he was too busy or confused about who he was. But I got something even worse—an answer.
He told me that his friends thought I was ugly and would make fun of him if we kept this up. On top of that, he said that I wasn’t very popular, and he was worried our classmates would think less of him if he kept hanging around me. He could do better.
The more I tried to fight back—to win him back—the more he told me I was crazy. The more he told me that this was all in my head, that we never had anything real anyways, and besides, he had dated other people and I never had—therefore, he was the authority on this. For the first time in my life, I apologized (for what I’ll never be entirely sure) and spent every day that followed trying to make myself more beautiful, more refined, more chameleon-like.
The only time I’ve sobbed, like real, racking tears, is that night when he called it all off. It’s true—I had never so much as kissed him, but my parents aside, he was the only person to have ever told me they loved me or said the words “I’m proud to be your friend.” What are you supposed to do when the only person who thought you were beautiful tells you that your eyes are scary, that your nose is too big? Who are you if the personality he said made him love you is now what he makes fun of to his friends? How do you continue to speak if words make you annoying?
My heart was broken and so was my sense of identity. I spent the three long years following that day hating everything about myself. I had crippling anxiety if I left the house without mascara on. I wore my hair down every single day, because he had once told me that’s when it looked the best. I wore and washed a dress he had once said he liked so many times that it began to fade. I stopped reaching out to my friends, because if he didn’t love me, no one did. I deliberately sought attention in every single one of my classes and bragged about my grades to anyone who would listen because my success in school was the only thing he had no jurisdiction over.
One day, I just got over it. There’s no rhyme or reason. There’s no overarching theme. I hated myself and then, just in time for me to become an adult, I didn’t. He was omnipresent and then he wasn’t. The sudden healing is one of the things about heartbreak I’ll never understand.
Despite her difficult experiences, Anna retains a strong sense of humor. She expresses that her closest brush with death was the time someone threw a Chik-Fil-A nugget at her.
As they are fried in peanut oil, and I have a pretty bad peanut allergy, that nugget spelled death. Nonetheless, I dodged just in time. It really puts one’s mortality into perspective, realizing that all it takes to kill you is a legume. It also made me realize that I probably shouldn’t make any powerful political enemies.
About Anna
Biological researcher by day, writer by night—both cells humans have stories to tell! Hobbies include crying over Naruto and wishing I had superpowers. Practices the refined art of conversation, has yet to master it. Collector of quotes and trivia facts.
Between the Lines 