Mayu Nakano

Writing Sample

*WRITTEN LIKE A PERSONAL STATEMENT, BUT TOO LONG TO BE A COMMON APP PERSONAL STATEMENT*

It felt as though we were in an hourglass brandished by the hand of a god.

I hardly looked up from the book in my hand, A Certain Ambiguity. Turbulence was nothing new.

Even as the seats started to shake and the water bottle in the seat pocket bounced up and down, I was

oblivious to the world outside the pages.

At first, the complicated arithmetic of the mathematical novel had led me to abandon it on my

shelf. But driven by the mundanity of vacation travel, I was trudging my way through the pages.

However, I looked up at a large snap. I turned to my brother, who, in the window seat, seemed

just as confused as I felt. His eyes reflected the unease that suddenly permeated the cabin. I peered over

the seats, and suddenly an acrid smell hit me. As I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, a loud

beep announced the oxygen masks dropping down from the ceiling.

What made my heart drop was the sight of the flight attendant; she seemed just as lost and

worried as everyone else. My head was pounding, and I thought my oxygen mask wasn’t working. In a

moment of giddy lunacy, I almost laughed out loud. The absurdity of the situation made it more tolerable,

in a way. This was like in the movies, I thought. I felt weird for not feeling the sorrowful, reflective

sentiment that seemed to fill the action-packed ending scenes of those movies; I just felt shocked.

What terrified me was the thought of the unknown, stretching far beyond what I could see with

my eyes. I started to feel dizzy: Was I being deprived of oxygen? I wondered if my life would flash before

my eyes, like in the novels that I read, but I could only see the faces of my family next to me, all

concerned and panicked. The roaring of the engine made it hard to think. The plastic of the overhead

compartments started to rupture because of the sudden change in air pressure, provoking gasps and

screams from the passengers.

As the seconds ticked by, I held onto time as dearly as I could. I thought about how I had wasted

the time that I was so fearful of losing now. I started to realize how I had been reserving my happiness for

a later time, pushing grades and school to the top of my priorities.

After what seemed like an eternity of stress, the captain announced that we would have to make

an emergency landing at the nearest airport. Cheers went up, and a sense of camaraderie that can only be

shared after collective terror filled the plane.

The tension from minutes before dissipated as our feet found firm ground. The overwhelming

feeling of being alive washed over me.

Barely a day later, I stood in a completely different world. The sand dunes stretched as far as the

eye could see. The only sign of civilization in this alien world was the tents, small rectangles of color

against the vast background of the golden sand.

We sat on the dunes around a campfire and watched the sunset. You could look to one side and

see the sky dyed orange and pink, the colors cascading as though flung through the sky, purples and blues

battling the oncoming darkness like wisps of smoke left after a candle goes out. Turning your head, there

was the unyielding darkness with a faint sprinkling of stars. The sun sank below the far-off horizon.

Sunlight remained as though forgotten, but was quickly extinguished by the dark navy ink.

I sat watching the last remnants of the campfire embers collapse into bright showers of sparks.

Brilliant pin-pricks of light drew my eyes up, following the flickering glimmers of the dying campfire to

the stars that shone so coldly. They were beautiful, but I felt detached. The velvet black skies and the

milky speckles held none of the warmth of the campfire, and suddenly I could taste ash on my tongue.

Time stood still on the hard wooden bench, my cheeks still warm from the fire, the heavens above

me in their inexpressible glory. When was the last time I let myself sit like this, with no worry about the

future? When last had I been unapologetically, fully here, rooted in the ephemeral present?

I thought back to the flight. As I looked up at the stars, I thought, this is the unknown, the world

of which I could not experience. Again, I felt grateful for being alive, but for a different reason.

That night, I finally finished the book, dimly lit by the steady glow of an oil lamp. At the

beginning of the novel, the main character seeks essential truth in a world he believes is no longer

beautiful. The story is about his search for truth as he rediscovers the love for Euclidean geometry that his

grandfather instilled. His rediscovery of the allure of mathematics awakened an analytical disposition that

I like to think I share.

But what captivated me more so than the character’s math lectures about the convergence of

infinite series were the discussions he held with his friends, in which he uses mathematics to examine

reality. His yearning for truth struck me as intimately familiar. His grandfather applies an axiomatic

structure to his worldview, inspired by Euclidean geometry. Yet, as he and his grandfather both discover,

there are co-existing truths that eliminate the possibility of absolute certainty. In the end, he gives into

acceptance of uncertainty, holding a sort of faith in the beauty of mathematics. The beauty that he saw in

numbers, in infinity, is something I hope to find for myself.

That night, by the campfire, with the frigid winds breathing on my skin, I knew that this was a

moment that I would hold onto when the seconds would start ticking by again: a moment when life was so

breathtakingly beautiful it made me see the present.