celeste moses
pearl div·er
/pərl ˈdīvər/
noun
a person who dives for pearl oysters.
As Mitski defines, in Pearl Diver, someone chasing a treasure at immeasurable depths, drowned for beauty.
The following are three college essays I used to apply to California College of the Arts (waitlisted), Laguna College of Art and Design (accepted with a 10,000 yearly scholarship) and OTIS College of Art and Design (accepted with a 16,000 yearly scholarship). These essays represent a period in my life in which a lot was uncertain but my ability to write melodramatic essays was not. These essays are published as submitted to my schools, grammar/spelling mistakes and all.
PROMPT: CCA’s mission is to develop an artist’s practice that culturally transforms their community through ingenuity and originality. In 500 words or less, tell us how your art reflects our values and may contribute to one or more of the following: community engagement, cultural innovation, or social and environmental responsibility.
Dear Mom,
Nobody came to your thirteenth birthday party. You told me so over half of a grilled cheese made with store brand bread. You’d spent the morning scrubbing the stink of the middle class out of your kitchen tiles and partitioning a saved paycheck on a store-bought cake and balloons. Only to sit at that table for hours after, stood up by all 24 of your classmates. I was in love with mourning your lost birthday party, so distraught that I'd cry my Cinderella makeup set off my face, and yet, not so disturbed to want to take that party hat off my head. I’ve always had a penchant for a bad party. You’d bring out my birth chart and tell me how me being a Pisces meant that a bad party was what I was destined for.
Yet, you didn’t flinch at things that bled, bit, or hurt, or ignored your thirteenth birthday. That was the thing that confused me the most perhaps. The way a soft cheeked creature like you could pick at roadkill and onlook the primordial heartbreak without ever taking part in the violence of life and grief.
And though you’ve told me plenty of times where I could take my little magazine and stick it, you gave me the idea for the best party I'd ever thrown.
Welcome to Tea Time, the second issue of Fever Dreams Magazine. It’ll have all the necessities of a good tea party; starting with appropriate wear. By featuring editorial shoots with kitschy little sustainable and BIPOC owned brands such as Angel Cult, Masa Toro, Kloby Klo and Earthangel, we’d create a publication dedicated to destroying fast fashion. We’d go to the ethical culinary community dedicated to vegan food that doesn’t taste like cardboard and rehabilitation for victims like me of the plague called eating disorders. Our cookbook section would include regional poetical recipes to beat down on insidious transportation emissions with profits fed into indigenous communities in my little slice of Big Bend, California. Throwing a party to hit the white man where it hurts. As Head of Design… I'd be in charge of decorations. A new age technicolor mess of colorful pages and teen girl spirit in the shape of all the quirkiest organic fonts I keep up my sleeve. Working with the USPS to support our post office, we’d send off our baby in safe hands to the doorsteps of our favorite fever dreamers.
Most importantly, we’d be dedicating a space to uplifting BIPOC delectation even when there is no murder, to celebrating LGBTQ+ joy even when there is no injustice. I think of my mother and how she can celebrate a birthday party even with no partygoers. Remembering moments where I loved my girlfriend so easily and abundantly and not in spite of anyone. I want to stand up for my community when they are abundantly joyful and not only out of vengeance. I just want to throw a party... and maybe i’ll cry at it.
COMMON APP ESSAY, PROMPT: Write freely about any subject that draws your interest or inspires you.
I hate Icebreakers
I’ve dreamt a bird into my bedroom window.
I’ve spent most of my life learning that I hate my mother like you can hate a house and everything in it.
I have fallen off of several things. Mostly cliffs, mountainsides, countertops, top bunks, windows, especially windows, skateboards, caves with bats in them and the primordial happy train. I fall a lot.
This week my heart stopped working. I have a picture in my camera roll of wires all over the place. It’s like out of all the awful months I’ve weathered, my heart decided this is where we take a pit stop, or a full stop. One of those. I don’t know yet my imaging appointment is on the tenth.
I still have not succeeded at anything. I am 18 and not supposed to have succeeded at anything but I am penalized DEEPLY for this because I am 18 but I am also poor. Poor people do not become real people unless they have succeeded at things by 18. I’m almost 19.
My body is a moat, gaping and wanting but nothing really falls into it unless it is an accident, or put there on purpose by people who do not want people near it. Like snakes and alligators. My mom puts lots of things in there like sharp rocks and stitches.
I am bad at punctuation. Fantastically bad at it. And grammar. These are things you learn as foundations, like a healthy brick house. My foundations are loose, inappropriate and course. I was not there when they were built and this is something laughable to people with things like PhD in their name or people who live in two story houses who weren’t sad in elementary school and their parents loved them and they have the kind of foundations that men with tool belts nod at and say “mmm yep that’s a solid foundation.”
When I get the right amount of sun I get a dusting of freckles on my top lip. My mom calls it a dirt mustache. It could be, because that is not my business. If I hated someone I would call their light dusting of freckles a dirt mustache too.
My mom is always telling me to look at things. Look, look a mountain, look, look, a dead cat, look, look there is something marvelous. I’m always looking anyway. I have looked and I’ve looked before she did, before she told me to. This shouldn’t annoy me so much but I have looked!
The point is, other kids have never stopped sleeping because when they do, it’s always of the same beautiful house that is so simple that you could drive right by it and not get the urge to press your face to the glass until it disappeared in the fog of your own breath.
But it is a good house with sturdy foundations.
It isn’t so much the functionality of a good house that intrigued me as it was the safety in those details. Soft warm wooden floors can’t crack skulls like the tile of my bedroom closet. Creamy yellow drapes aren’t merely a tool for enhancing the good grace of a south facing window but for soaking up all the daylight and spirit of a well used kitchen until they lingered like the smell of christmas time and warm bread.
I’ve only lived in three houses like this before and on days like Mondays when I don’t want to keep eating, breathing, handling the megalithic responsibility of being alive, I can’t even remember the color of the wall paper. Only the blood stains on the wood floors and the microwave I split my head on and the dent in the floor my mom’s head left and how my not blood relative uncle stuck the heads of squirrels my cat chewed over popsicle sticks in the backyard.
Which is why I can’t stand when doors close too hard and the sound of a grocery bag set down with too much force because there’s this need to scuttle to safety and sweep the floor but I don’t even have the energy to do the bare minimum like make my lungs move.
I don’t want to see the house where I’ll never grow up because I grew up already and I hate finding out about things too late but I can’t stand how the doors slam and I’ve done something wrong again while I was waiting for my legs to work so that’s when I bite the bullet and take the diphenhydramine and sleep anyway.
PROMPT: Explain your interest in studying art at otis college of art and design:
I never realized how much roadkill there was in Arkansas until I was gone. There’s probably a statistic for that somewhere. It's like people do it for sport, hitting animals with cars. I think about it a lot. Mostly because my mom says I have a bleeding heart and can’t leave dead or half-dead animals well enough alone. I bike to the store every other day and I’m always making these pit stops to pull animals out of the road to a cool mossy ditch, then I find a flower or something to dignify the unfortunate scramble.
I’m told this makes me compassionate. I feel like that's a lie, though, because to me it’s more of an act of solidarity, or empathy, or something closely in between, which if you ask me, is largely different from compassion.
Growing up a lesbian in the south is a lot like being roadkill. Or growing up fatherless or with ADHD, or anything else not ritualistically ingrained into middle-class suburbia and football. Like moving back to California and majoring in the arts. It’s like getting hit with a car so many times that you’re so bent and disfigured nobody even wants to poke you with a stick. I should know—I've been hit by a car twice.
Like the year the world flattened me out via my favorite cousin committing suicide, and then they put the car in reverse and ran right back over me when my cat died— of cancer. My great grandmother died right after that but adding her to this essay is largely debatable because the only reason I knew she existed is the five dollar bills I received in the mail on February 18th every year. She did die though.
Sometimes I need to look down to make sure I don’t have tire tracks on my sweater. I’m starting to think this town is cursed.
It took me two weeks of being back in California to notice. It was like I was so busy figuring out how to breathe right that I didn’t even realize how I could take the whole road of Big Bend and never swerve for roadkill once.
I think that’s a little how my love for Otis went, like this slowly creeping realization that there was somewhere I could be that I wouldn’t have to double-check both ways before stepping out and getting hit by a semi-truck anyways.
Returning to California made me realize how I’d missed it like a lung. I didn’t realize how I breathed easier just to be home. It felt a little like running away, which looks bad to people who make Marvel movies with intense intrapersonal morals, but to me, it was just another desperate way of crushing myself into survival. That’s the bravest thing I’ve done, I think. Going home. I think the thought of Otis drew me in like that, picturing turning off the exit from I-5 S and feeling the sun soak in. Having the strength to think I deserve it.
Graphic design is generally justifiable to the money-hungry-upper-middle-class as one of the lesser evils of art because: hey, you can always go corporate. I hate justifying myself. And I hate corporate. For me, choosing a program to land in, I needed something breathable, something autonomous. The fear of losing my design identity in commercial banners and advertisement ops is daunting, but the design program at Otis is something I feel safe in. There’s room to breathe and room to grow. With a crosswalk of a program focused on all branches of art and design, be that printing, app design, magazines… corporate. The point is at Otis, I don’t need to duck or stumble or not cross the street at all for fear of being tossed into the tumble. I’ve spent so long being terrified of returning to that feeling, like I was being flattened from the outside in with nowhere to go but the crush of cracked pavement.
I think that’s what I crave most, for whatever I create to last. Whatever pieces of me that I whittle out to be wholly me and endure the slamming pavement and the primeval motor shipwreck of the real world. Otis understands that, the use for arts outside of making it big-time in the capitalist Thunderdome.
When you’re younger and you live through the things I did, grown-ups always want to tell you that you’re very brave, very resilient. But when I think about it, my cupidity for warmth wasn’t brave at all. I was just too scared to die. It’s that egocentrist need for survival that makes me choose Otis. For me, Otis is the perfect conglomeration of home and mutability I'm always searching for. It’s a selfishness to me, the selfishness to want to live, to pull myself out of the way just in time.