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JULY 2003

High School Student Wins 1st Prize
in Marymount Essay

Every year, Lewis Frumkes, Director of the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College, holds the Mortimer Levitt Contest for high school students around the city. The following essay won first prize.

Keep Smilin’
by Zachary Zwillinger

I subdivide my life into periods of Lenore: before I knew her, when we were a couple, when I hated her, and so on. I suppose it’s only natural, a person who has come to so define my later childhood, a person whom many can’t picture me without. We are, once again, a couple filled with the bliss of unassuming love, stuffed with a unique mix of teenage intellectualism and goofy lust. And yet, how clearly I remember other times, when things were not as easy. Of course, there were times I couldn’t stand to look at her, but they are irrelevant and (more importantly) uninteresting. It was that time when I was jealous of her, while we were going out, that has the meat of my introspection. That she was beautiful and kind, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. But that she was, well, brilliant... yep, that’s where my troubles sat.

Why couldn’t I deal with that? I spent so many days walking with her, as random people would congratulate her on this award and that team and so on. I was smart too! Or so I would tell myself.

But how horrible is that? I used to feel so bad about being angry at her for being successful, at my wishing she wouldn’t win. She was so kind and wonderful, and I loved her, and to wish badly for her tore me up inside. The one person in the world that she could rely on in times of trouble, waited to see her fall. What a misery I found myself falling into. Instead of telling her how I felt, I just smiled. But I couldn’t show that to her, so I smiled. At every opportunity I would try to show I was happy for her, (and in many ways, I wished I could be happy for her, that I could sing her triumphs as well as take her tears), and it was difficult, but my “proud” grin persisted.

Eventually we broke up, hated each other for over a year, found each other as support in conjugal time of sadness, in the rain, in Delaware, under odd circumstances, became friends, and became a couple once more.

One night we were talking, and she mentioned a three-week trip to Germany she had won.

“Yeah,” she said, almost casually, “Steve was the only one who was really happy for me about the German thing. Not even you.” I was shocked. All that false smiling, that energy spent on trying to be the good boyfriend, and she had known.

I’d like to say, “And I was all at once happy for her,” but I can’t. At this stage, I’d hate to betray myself. But we talked, and we argued, and after a while I sort of gave up on jealousy. It was just too tiring. Thankfully, I had her to help me through it.#.

 

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