I have been writing personal essays like mad for my Nonfiction class. I'm going to post some of them here. This is the first one I wrote (apologies for the N-word, but the story really doesn't work without it):

The Second Funniest Story From My Mission

We were out on the eastern edge of Winston-Salem, where tiny old houses smelling of gas heaters thinned out, when we met Merle. He was walking home, covered in dust and wearing a blue handkerchief around his head. He stank of sweat and dirt. He smiled a mouth full of gold teeth at us and said, “I just got saved. In prison!”
Merle was a former Crip from Baltimore. He used the N-word as instinctively as most people use contractions. “I was one bad nigga, let me tell you. If I hadn’t gone to prison I’d be dead. I been shot here,” he said, and pointed at his jaw, “and here,” he pointed to his arm, “and here,” his leg, “here” his side, “here…” The final count was eight places. He shook his head. “Lots of the niggas I used to run with is in the ground, you know?”
We shook our heads like we knew.
I’d be tempted to think he was making this stuff up, but he was so completely, effortlessly honest. He smiled that big gold-toothed smile and said the kinds of things that I had heard about in rap but never believed really happened. “There was this one time I asked my cousin to hold something for me, you know, some stuff. So I called him up and I was like, where’s the smack, nigga? And I knowed that nigga was high. So I went on over there with my glock behind my back and I was like, ‘open up, nigga!’ And he opens up and there’s these two big old niggas there with them baseball bats, and one of them gets me upside the head and I’m stumbling around in the street and I get in my car while those niggas is beating on me and I start shooting like crazy, can’t see a damn thing, and I’m just waving the gun over my head and shooting.” He laughed like we would laugh with him. “I peeled out and shot sixteen rounds—I didn’t hit one of them niggas!”
At the end of the night, after we handed him a Book of Mormon and asked him to pray about it, he got up and solemnly put his scarred, sweaty arms around us, rich with his odor. “Y’alls my niggas now,” he said as he embraced us.
It was probably the greatest compliment a suburban white boy, pouring his heart out on the streets of North Carolina, could hope for. For one hilarious moment, the gospel of Jesus Christ had given us all an identity as one. We were each other’s brothers, companions, niggas.