Kimos Essay

Kimo Gray
2.03.09
Mr. Hamilton Salsich
English 9

The Freedom of Confinement:
An Essay on Liberation through Imprisonment
I have felt imprisonment in my life. True, this had not felt anything like the confinement of the Holocaust, nor have I been incarcerated. But I have felt imprisonment. Though painful, it is something I must endure to appreciate my freedom. There will always be forms of imprisonment, but there are a variety of freedoms.
There are many forms of Imprisonment, be them physically or mentally, rightful or unjust. If I was to be imprisoned, there would only be one thing that could keep me happy, the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” by Monty Python. This song is at heart, a funny song, and at 4:29 seconds long it may not seem very extensive, but I’ve had so many memories with this song, be them long car trips with my family to my friends and I trying to interpret the line “For life is quite absurd… And You must always face the curtain with a bow,” that reliving all these memories would take days. This song’s title truly speaks for itself, this is a song about how atrocious (FAST) the world can be and how strength can be found anywhere, and I find comfort in that. If I had to live in a place where I had no control over my life besides hearing this one song, then I could have the happiness that everyday sustains me. Every day my highlight is the same: coming home and getting a big hug from my little brother. I love him dearly, and I think even going away to school next year would be a sort of “imprisonment” in the sense that I wouldn’t get to see him every day. It would be great to be able to see him every day if I was imprisoned, but it would just be too painful knowing that I wouldn’t be “with” him. At least away at school, I would be able to communicate and interact with him, even if it be from a distance. These requests might seem strange to some people, but these are two attributes of my day that would truly make me happy.
Freedom is hard to describe. It is liberation, the lifting of weight off your shoulders. For me freedom is represented in music. To be as free as an unwritten symphony is freedom. With the dozens of instruments, chords, notes and melodies there are endless possibilities to envision, to create, and to embrace (Tricolon). Though music may sound similar, there is never a piece that is played the same way twice. I also wish to be as free as a daydream, taking me to faraway places I didn’t know existed. From a mozzarella castle in the middle of Iceland, to a grape drink Jacuzzi, daydreams are unbounded (FAST). For me, freedom is simply the ability to imagine, be that musically or musingly.
I am not free. There is always some constraint, some imposition, some unappreciated task (Tricolon) that holds me from achieving complete freedom, such as a school essay. But even then freedom is found, in spurs of words, and jumbles of wisdom. There is freedom everywhere, but the only way to see it is to not concentrate on breaking out of prisons, but to concentrate on nothing in particular, and to just wonder.