Emma Salino

Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. It was a book about raccoons. It was yellow and chewed in the corner, and I never really paid much attention to it. I was four. I picked it up and sat where I stood. I was bored, and the book was just lying there, on a pile of other books. I had intended to flip through the pages, simply look at the pictures. But that wasnt the case. Everything was muted except the voice of the book as I read it, whispering the secrets and trade of a booklover. It talked of a future full of books and a broad mind, of wide eyes and a secret to life. I became an apprentice of books, influenced by various thoughts and observant of everything around me. As I grew older the same fingers that caressed the pages of a book became the very fingers I used to let go of the rope my friends and I gripped in tug-of-war: a sort of prank for the other team. The mouth that smiled at Ron and Hermiones emerging love is the same mouth whose voice rang loud and clear, passionately advocating against the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a class discussion. Now, as I walk the shelves of the library I feel slightly overwhelmed. So many possibilities, I think. But its comforting, these possibilities waiting for me. They are all chosen instinctively, these books. I let the books work me, mold me, influence my already broadened thoughts. I didnt realize the world was connected until I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I didn't see the abstract contradictions of man until I read The Picture of Dorian

Emma Salino

Gray by Oscar Wilde; I still have the patched sunburn on my thigh as I read Dorian Gray and other books for three hours, waiting for my mother to pick me up one Saturday afternoon. I submerge myself in these books, adrenaline pinched in the mystery of First Grave on the Right, inhaling crisp air in Better Than Running At Night. With books, I am home. I am safe. I enter new worlds constantly, and that is home. In life, I am the same. I observe from afar while I dive in the frenzy. I live in many worlds: at school there is impermanence, at home there is culture, in me there is wonder. I flit here and there; at school I consider a future in history one moment and in art the next. At the Vans Warped Tour I crowd-surf a performance one hour and am almost buried under the crowd at another performance, at another hour. But writing and reading are my pillars, the very structure that holds me together. My pen is the weapon my tongue fails to translate. The paper is the reminder that some things should be written, and some spoken. I sit and read the same way I stand and live. With passion. Patience. Dedication. Receptiveness. But like a book, I am still bound: bound in the same place Ive always been. I have not yet seen the world -only glimpsed- nor have I solidified my own perspective yet. I have seen others' perspective, but its theirs, not mine.

Emma Salino

Reading the ink-soaked pages of books created a thirst for adventure, for a life worth reading. I am both the author and protagonist of my life. College is my climax, and Ill decide when my dnouement is. And to think, it all started with a book.