back to where I had smashed the sponge

“It couldn’t be any other way.  Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments.  There’s not a single thing that happens to you that doesn’t leave its mark, doesn’t redirect your course somehow, doesn’t make you more fully who you are.  It took every single step—even the steps you took as life dragged you by the hair of your head—to put you exactly where you are.”

                                    ~~ Jefferson Bass, Bones of Betrayal

            I’ve had many dreams of late, colors and words and faces swirling together in a stream of changing scenes and feelings.  Waking up, I can only try to put together the fragments, like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, some locking together to create a longer narrative while others never quite come together.

            “How do you feel, sitting with these classmates again?” a voice within me inquired.  I looked around at the smiling, expectant faces, eager to learn and expand their knowledge of molecular biology.  Years ago, we had been classmates, some even friends, and we had not seen each other since then.  Now, we came back together to listen to teachers weave together stories about the building blocks of life, how we all came to be.

            “I am pleased,” I replied, smiling at the others.  “We are making amends.”

            “Amends?” the voice asked, confused by what I meant.

            “For not being kind enough to each other.  For taking others for granted, for ignoring the inherent truth at the core of us all—that we all struggle to survive and we all need to hear that we will be okay.”  I paused, to remember the countless days I wandered the hallways trying to be optimistic, but also hoping I would go unnoticed.  “We are together again having seen more of life and the world, and we will be kinder.  Although we cannot rewrite the past, we can make amends.”

            I’ve been researching graduate programs in Forensic Science for the last month or two.  In high school, all I wanted to be was “a Forensic Scientist for the FBI.”  For my senior project, I created a crime scene—a three-foot by three-foot by three-foot crime scene of plywood, Plexiglas, and carpet.  I found a recipe for a fluid with a similar viscosity to blood and splattered drops of it at different angles.  I calculated the ratio of the drops, pairing that ratio with the angle of impact.  Then, I soaked a sponge in the fake blood and splattered it across my crime scene, smashing the sponge with a hammer.  Working backwards, as if seeing the gruesome scene for the first time, I attached strings to the individual blood spatters at the angle at which they hit the surface and was able to trace the trajectories back to where I had smashed the sponge.

I found my project in a box of old school things and read through it.  There was a post-project questionnaire that I had to fill out and one of my answers was, "I am even more excited to study this field than before."

            I have contemplated what caused my fixation on becoming a forensic scientist.  After all, I never watched any crime shows until my junior year of college, and we didn’t have an introductory class in high school.  The only thing I can think of is the day I heard the crunch of steel on steel.  I ran to the scene of a massive accident on Lake Road.  I had my camera with me, I loved taking photos of anything, and I snapped photos from every angle.  I wondered why it had happened, who was at fault, and if it could have been prevented.  I’ve always asked questions as to why something happens and how certain things come to pass.  Perhaps it is this curious nature that caused me to choose forensic science.

            It is this need for answers that led me to choose Environmental Studies after Hurricane Katrina and the mudslides in Guatemala and the huge earthquake in the Indian Ocean that resulted in that horrific tsunami.  I wanted to answer those very same questions I had tried to answer after the car accident.  As I studied, I knew the answers would never come, but I kept reaching.  After years of obsessing, I finally accepted that these questions would never be answered when it came to nature and the environment.  So, my focus has returned to the less-grey nature of forensic science—a desired path I had buried with my pre-Katrina past, but it was always there, trying to be heard.

After analyzing how the blood spattered on each surface depending on the angles, I created my crime scene, measured the spatter and calculated the angles of impact to put the story back together.

            In order to qualify for the graduate programs I have found of interest, I must take a few more science classes before I am fully qualified.  I will take Molecular Biology & Genetics and Organic Chemistry in the spring and summer in order to begin a graduate program in the fall.  Since it has been years since I have studied chemistry, I am attempting to re-teach myself general chemistry so I will be ready for the more advanced organic chemistry.  I am still in the beginning chapters, but I find the problems to be fun—little puzzles that lead to one answer in black or white, no grey.  I have missed the world of hard science.

            However, there is so much more I have to do in order to enter a forensic science graduate program.  I have to fill out the applications, visit campuses to tour the laboratories and talk to current students.  But I am nervous that none of the programs will accept me, being as competitive as they are, and that thought makes me so anxious that I am almost too nervous to try.  Then, there is another part of me that insists if I try my best, I will succeed.  When this voice is louder, my heart beats with excitement and anticipation of what life has in store for me. 

            And how I want this so much.  I feel like I have gone to the end of the earth and returned only to find that what once was true is still true because some things never change—whether that truth is my desire to study forensics or the truth is more universal about the survival and desires of each and every one of us.