Just One More by Beatriz

Just One More by Beatriz - October 2019 Scholarship Essay

My eyelids grow heavy with the repetitive motions of my pencil, yet my senseless daze is halted abruptly with the turn of a lock. The stomp of his boots echoed through my silent dwelling. His lips pressed against my forehead to kiss me hello, the heat emanating from his body seemingly scorching my skin and the pungent odor of sweat mixed with asphalt burning my nostrils. I opened my eyes and looked at my father’s familiar face, the gleam of sweat still coursing down his smiling, sunburned cheeks.

As was customary, he sat down on the other side of the scratched and scarred mahogany table, stacks of carbon paper to his left, a whirring computer slowly loading to his right, and a battered notebook between his hands. He looked up at me on the other side of the table, a tired grin formed as he joked about us being the only workers at home. I would meet his gaze, the haze that glazed his eyes examining my own before, in silent accord, we returned to our respective tasks.

We spent years in that silent exchange of emotions, his vacant yet seemingly empathetic expression casting an all-knowing glance in my direction as my mind stumbled to find the correlation between the grin that danced around his lips and his hollowed eyes.

It was exhaustion.

With time, I found that the grin was a façade to motivate me to continue to work, nothing but a mirage my father formed so that I felt his silent encouragement. As my father and I aged and our work marathons began to near midnight hours, my eyes began to notice the minute features of his overworked face: the red marks one only gains from prolonged exposure to the sun’s unforgiving rays, the black asphalt that compacted itself under his impossibly short fingernails, the way his hand twitched from gripping a pencil after handling construction equipment from dawn to dusk.

A frustration festered within me when he would give me his usual encouraging grin and, when I would ask when it is that he was going to rest, he always answered, “Just one more.” He never specified what he was referring to, as though saying he needed one more hour would result in me holding him to his word or saying one more entry in his notebook would worry me. So, he truncated his words and diminished my perception of his burdens. Yet he wasn’t aware that I knew what his short replies meant and how they bludgeoned my chest.

Looking down at my assignments, I filled out the college-ruled lines of paper with as much literary insight as I could muster, eyeing my father’s yawning face before swiftly looking back down, my mind envisioning him going to rest early. This image cut through my consciousness, ridding me of the blockades that impeded my understanding of literary terms and mathematical concepts. His tired eyes awakened my own, lifting the veil of sleepiness from my vision and allowing me to carefully craft my arguments. His shaking hands instilled in me an innate desire to not let go of my pencil until I had completed my assignments. My longing to eliminate the need for his arduous labor consumed me, his gentle smile—despite the physical and mental pain—resonated through the edges of my mind, and I found myself encapsulated by an unhuman need to succeed for both my sake and his.

All I need is one more hour. One more night. One more week. One more month. One more year. Afterward, I commence the cycle again for as long as need be, as my father does. Our nightly escapades into the mountains of papers we have accumulated throughout the week have taken on a new meaning, no longer serving as mere moments we spend together to complete our duties. They’ve metamorphized, eating at my mentally drained state and replacing it with a transcendental feeling of determination to do everything to not see my father’s physique slowly deterring from his work and his mind unraveling itself in front of the computer. My academic prowess was birthed from his gentle smile, growing from my father’s physical weaknesses that made themselves more prevalent with each passing day and maturing from my own desire to one day erase the need for his burdensome occupation. His presence serves as the most powerful form of encouragement and his sacrifice as the loudest clarion call to persevere and succeed.