Common App Essay

Prompt: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story.

One hundred and forty pairs of eyes stare at me, but I look above their heads, unwilling to let my poker face thaw until the beat is reverberating steadily in my head. It's my first show as the center drum major and the rickety podium I stand on trembles, though I don't know whether to blame its age or my own quaking knees. There’s a bubble encasing our collective energy, barely rounding the extended toe of the last marcher on the field, outside of which nothing exists. It’s not until my tongue is softly clicking eighth notes for my hands to match in half time that I look down into a beautifully familiar pair of light blue eyes, tonight lit with nerves. We breathe in together, and as my hands descend, the opening note of my best friend’s solo creates a hole in the bubble just wide enough for the sound to glow. It’s round and full, and I get the stilling sense that this is sacred; his eyes tell me that he feels it, too. His solo closes perfectly, as I knew it would but he always doubts, and the band turns slowly from backfield to front. There are two measures of bare-boned silence, and I half-smile as I think, they won’t know what hit them. I breathe in as my hands strike beat 3, and on beat 4 I'm suspended in a spell.

I’m transported back to another day, another year, another spell. We’re rehearsing the same set again and again in stifling September heat after a long day of my least favorite classes, and my legs want nothing more than to march me right home, but I bend them to my will, and run back to my dot. Every time. My band director barks “Reset!” into his microphone like a past-his-prime gym teacher telling you to sprint, and goddammit, I reset like nobody’s business. I yell, “C’mon, saxes!” because I have an almost unhealthy determination to show our supreme section spirit, or at the very least, let the flutes eat our dust. At first, I’m the only one running, and I’m regarded as the somewhat crazy spirit queen. The joke’s on them, because I know that my annoying enthusiasm will burst from my every pore and force their legs forward until they’re moving of their own accord. We’re an hourglass: I release every grain of my spirit until the hourglass flips on its head, and their newfound spirit pours back into mine. We run together, beaming, yelling, then skidding on the pavement to compensate for our overzealous strides. Our shouts intermingle until I can’t hear my own. I’m drunk on the feeling that we’re no longer individuals, but one giant shape, like silly putty: morphing and straining and stretching but always staying together. We form one body; we breathe one sound. Now, under the lights, the silly putty stays together. We stay together. I feel their unabashed energy, and I know that although the band is marching steadily in time, their souls are running, skidding, shouting.

The hype squad kids in their trendy spirit day outfits cheer when the show ends, and we make our way past them in our ill-fitting bibbers and mass-manufactured marching shoes… and I am proud. We chant, “Band is a sport!” and they laugh, not unkindly. It strikes me that this feeling of flaunting the decidedly uncool and being benevolently laughed at is the world’s most on-brand description of high school band.

I will always bare my dorky, dancing soul in front of raised eyebrows, because I know it breathes life into the stagnant, and that those raised eyebrows are a mask for something else. I’m a band kid, and I know something the cool kids don’t: everybody secretly wants to run back to their dot.