I knocked on the door. The next second, all the seventh graders turned around and looked at me. On the inside, I felt my bones shake once more. It felt like the first time I walked into this room a year ago. The little screen still hung on the right side of the main wall, displaying the teacher’s PowerPoint. The bright light once again made me feel dizzy. It was like a dream. The only difference is that the room was now filled with the potent smell of soapy water. I began to wonder whether this room had been thoroughly soaked in a sudsy film and sanitized before the start of the school year. After all, the room had now become a Science classroom, not an English classroom. As I sat on the seat, the aroma of a disinfectant solution bombarded my nostrils and made me recollect the days when this space was much less intrusive.
There was an ethereal presence that loomed in Mrs. Reeves’s English classroom. Fragrant candles were often lit and offered a warm and inviting atmosphere. I cherished the scent those candles diffused; they stimulated my senses and my imagination. Some smelled like cotton candy. I could feel the sweetness ignite my taste buds, and I could almost taste the sugar melting on my tongue. It reminded me of the happiness I experienced as a little girl carrying a pillar of puffy pink perfection at an amusement park. Sometimes, the scent was the smell of a bright carefree summer. There was an occasion when it was a very chilly winter day outside. Mrs. Reeves lit a coconut candle on her desk. Though it sat on that plastic plane, when I momentarily closed my eyes, it swept me to a warm tropical oasis. The sun pierced my skin and beat at my eyelids. Seagulls hovered around, and people scurried about playing Frisbee and constructing mansions of sand. I began to feel uncomfortable in my thick jacket like I had dressed inappropriately for that day.
The English classroom environment provided an excellent place to write poetry. Each individual’s thoughts floated about in midair, colliding with the candles’ various wafts of aroma. The corkboard was littered with a colorful assortment of students’ poetry papers. They were polychromatic like a rainbow, making me want to discover the treasure at the rainbow’s end. Reading the poems written by my classmates, I realized the differing degrees of our existence and perceived a more intimate side to others’ hearts. Slowly, I became more inclined to appreciate this once neglected form of art in my mind. The magical aura of the English classroom morphed me. Before I was enrolled in the English class, I would feel nervous about poetry because it did not register with me. However, during creative writing exercises, my teacher encouraged me to feel the poems even if I had no idea about what the poem was inferring. She was right. I presently like to both write and read poems. I can see the deer hides behind the trees, the fog suffuses in the forest.
As both of my feet were planted on what I knew as the English classroom floor, I began to hear the words, “In photosynthesis, what substance turns into oxygen and glucose?” Mrs. Dodd’s question pulled me back into what is now the world of science.
“Carbon Dioxide and water.” the seventh-graders answered.
There is only one right answer in science. If your answer is wrong, then you are wrong. However, literature is not constrained by these boundaries. There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes. We always came up with our own ideas when it was an English room. Debates were always sparked by our varying viewpoints. The influx of discussion would almost always bring a close to the day and sometimes conjure laughter among peers.
What I used to hear was now deafening silence. The clock tick-tocked on the wall. Mrs. Dodd talked about photosynthesis and the students carefully took notes. The wind blew through a raised window and lifted papers hung on the corkboard, on which the chemistry formulas were written. Scientists cannot even miss a single symbol in a chemistry formula. If they did so, the world will be a mess. They have a tremendous responsibility.
On the contrary, literary writers offer readers a more colorful way in which to view life. Writing or reading in this room was like creating a new world of dreams. There used to be three shelves standing in the back corner of the room. Those shelves were amassed with many examples of these writings. They also contained different worlds in them: Chinese Qing dynasty where Wang Lung lives with his family, Salem where witchcraft is popular, the wide Mississippi River on which Huck builds up a friendship with Jim, etcetera. All these gave me a key to fantasy.
However, the smell of the soapy water dragged me into reality. The bell rang to end the class, and a big bubble burst. I fled to the current English room, wishing to pick the dream back up.
