Young Writers Society

It sits on the edge of everywhere and the middle of nowhere. Stars gleam up above like freckles on a familiar face. I sit on top of a silver tower glinting in the moonlight. Unlike others, there is not a sound coming from the entire city. We are all part of the city that time forgot. We never see another face. There are no cars bustling through the streets. No lights coming from billboards. We come here in the sleepless nights when our minds wander through the galaxy. We come on the rainy days when all we want to do is feel the sun's radiant beams on our face. We all dread when the sun will return because when it does the city fades like sand in an hour glass. When we look back we realise the city was never really there.

Mist cloaks the street and my eyes search the inky space between orange street lights. I whisper my ally’s names, not daring to speak louder than I have to. My sweatshirt pocket hangs light over my stomach. Too light. They confiscated our flashlights. I can’t see. Voices, I hear their voices again. Stumble, stumble through the dark, through knotted trees and over wet rock walls. Somewhere, music plays. Back against the wall, it’s time to hide. A dark phantom. I breath his name into the shadows. “I’m here, I’m here, follow me.” I leap up and we’re together, holding hands, running for our lives. Crouching in the grass, dewy and slick. They’re here now. A line of seekers, flashlights projecting out in front of them. Endgame. We can’t escape this. Our final run, leaping over discarded bikes and plates of food. “The pool!” he yells. “They won’t follow us!” Feet slam patio pavers, we weave through throngs of people. Smoke fills my nostrils. My partner and I reach the edge and leap, plunging away from the others. Together we bob up to the surface and grin up at the tangle of disgruntled kids because we won and we did the impossible. In my bed, later that night, still smelling the smoke, and the chlorine, the sunscreen, and bug spray, I lay my face onto my cool pillow, and listen to the crickets out my window and the laughter from the party. As I drift off, I can only think about how lucky and alive I am. How I love my ally. How it feels to be young. And whenever I feel the soft touch of a summer night wind, I’m still that runner, forever leaping into the unknown.

Echeveria Elegans Gesneden. A name I know for the moment, but one that will leave my mind by the end of the day. I place the plant in the dirt, gently patting the cool soil around it, protecting the plant’s roots and giving it a place to call home. I’ve made it my job to protect the succulent’s innocence, for it gives me something to hold onto, it reminds me that there is purity to be found in the world, and it give me a purpose of my own. Echeveria Black Prince. A name I’m more likely to remember, though I know I never will. I add this one to the glass bowl, repeating the same procedure as I earlier did with the Echeveria Elegans Gesneden. When I finish the process, I let my fingers dance over the Prince for a moment, admiring the simplicity of his structure and wishing I could obtain the ease in which he lives his life. His leaves are round, his body is green, his days are of leisure. Echeveria Green Velvet, Echeveria Elegans Gesneden, Echeveria Grus. More names that I will not remember, but sit at the center of my attention for the moment I’m living in. I add pebbles, stones, and decorative rocks, only stopping when I am satisfied. Holding the pot in both hands, I place it on my bookshelf, next to my window. I take second to appreciate the silence that has come with the moment, for it’s just a taste of the peace that the world has to offer, and to this peace I hold tightly, for I do not know when I will witness it again.

I designed this room with the length of my bed pressed against the glass screened porch. I cannot go out through it. The door acting less as a door and more as a fogged window, a book light, a glass wall, a second home. A second home, because Saturday nights I mostly amuse myself perched on my bed nest, thinking myself made of dust particles like some creature of the glass. Tonight, I tap a screen phone, I stare at computer screens, I sleep bare naked skin stickied against the glass screened porch as a slug might. A chemistry, the way skin clings, the way electrons call me through to it. The door whispers to me, pleading if I can just use him as a door again, and I can walk myself through to him into the open world. But, see, door—look where you might lead me! I cannot for the life of me see without the screen of my contacts dilating the lightning storm, watching the rain fall outside at conflict with itself. One time - muggy and gently, like summer kisses upon the glass but another time, it is dripping monsoons. Continuous sheets, curtain falls of water layering glass and sloshing around violent sprays, and acid leaks, a torrent pounding with my heart, little palpitations, little rhythmic escapes where my breath pours itself cold against the glass. Then, there! The sting of Zeus, the world in white burned to my glass eyes, my reflection mirrored and flipped in a million refracted ways, and I can see how the light just enters through me as if I were just but a lonely ghost in this world. A pretty, glass and artificial world holding back all hell. And the me, within, holding in whales.

When we were children, forts were for another adventure, for curling up small bodies and poking out grinning faces from behind the sheets when our mothers came in to check on us. Now they're for when sturdy walls and harsh white lights are too much to live up to, and I make my own walls, gangly limbs poking out where they don't fit. Softer light filters through the sheets onto my book- a sanctuary. Someday, they'll be for when the world is so loud that I can't hear your voice, and cotton walls draped above grown bodies will cradle our words for each other until the world's noise is silenced by our laughter- a home.

I can feel the walls closing around me and I don't know what to do. This isolation, this suffocation, reminds me of you. On each wall I see each and every one of your lies. I scream and scream, but no one cares... because no one can hear my cries. I don't know if it's a dream or if I'm really here. Even so, I can do nothing about it. You've maintained your hold over me that you established before, bit by bit. I feel weaker by the second; I'm not strong enough to keep the walls at bay. The suffocation grows intense and I just want to fall to my knees and pray. All I want to do now is just forget it all; I don't want to relive our time from the rise to the fall. The strength of the walls overpower me, and brings me to the very last moments of my eternal misery. My breath is slowly pushed out of me and I cough up blood; as finally, the walls around me come together with a loud thud.

The scene being what it is, there is no curtain. The audience is there, immediate, raw, so close, yet so far. I venture out - against my fear, against my nerves - feeling so brave and so little and so great. The moment is here and I stumble, stumble over my words as I practised. I feel the flow.

When I climb up my favorite ol' tree, I believe that I can finally be free. Certainly nothing could pull me down from here. If I wanted to, I could simply disappear. Momma can’t take me down to go do boring ol' chores. Neither can Pa make me go back indoors. All I want to do is lie down here and feel that kind breeze. I’d simply like to remain here at ease. I know that my life is one that is meant to be relaxing and free. Therefore, I refuse to climb down this tree.

I keep asking the tarot cards who the next president will be. I keep pulling the card Strength. The man will press his fat thumb against my people until we turn every color of our flag. The woman will promise us safety, turn, and laugh like the devil. This system is a smoke-filled room watching us scurry like ants through the magnifying glass. We are a school of fish trying to find asylum in the jaws of the tiger. We are gnawing off our leg just to keep our head.

They say dreams are memories. What if they are wrong. What if memories are memories and dreams are dreams. Dreams seem so real and vibrant while memories are faded like old photographs in broken frames. If dreams are memories why is it that when we wake they rush away, a stick in a river that is our mind. If dreams are memories are memories dreams? Or is it like squares and rectangles. Do you ever ask yourself, Am I really awake?

Words run smoothly through my mind like melted butter through a bowl of popped kernels of corn. See that butter that flows is like the flow of the words from my mind to paper to the mind of the person who reads it to the soul down deep inside them and out their mouth again as they share it with a friend. I love to write my poems cause it’s a way to make my voice heard. Even though I can easily write a story of words that don’t flow but pop on paper as I type them like popcorn in the microwave instead of butter down the corn inside the bowl, but I don’t feel that’s effective. You see those words are just on paper and they’re plain like fresh popped corn so they really have no meaning til you spice it up some more. Really my prose just don’t flow on the paper like the poems that come from my soul. This poetic prose is a way for those to see a less confusing version of my mind and my soul, and as all of the words flow I feel my soul go from my heart and through my veins into my fingers to the keys onto the page where people see all of the words that infest the insides of me. See I’m not an open book, more like extended thoughts on paper written like a man who takes a pen and draws some flowy lines instead of blocks so he can show how much stuff flows when it comes from the soul and creates this wispy flow that only he had known but now it's out there in the world and the people now all know of the stuff that lives inside of his special paper world.

When I was young I used to dance and I can’t anymore, it’s important for you to know that. It’s not a decision I made, not dancing, it’s just who I am now. When there’s loud music and bodies too close together I panic and I feel like I’m drowning in my anxiety. Before you, I dated someone who could not pronounce my name. I never corrected him, and it’s silly but I pretended I was just someone else. With a name that wasn’t mine and hands and feelings and words that belonged to someone else too. I thought if I didn’t claim my heart it would hurt less when it got broken like it wouldn’t really be me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of night and wonder if the organ that beats life through my body has somehow been replaced with a stranger’s and that my dreams and my desires have been replaced with unfamiliar substitutions. Sometimes I think my only real identity is my fears; because they do not change, they are there without reason, and often without context, within every happiness and sadness they are there. Don’t ask me why I am who I am. Don’t ask me why I am scared to dance and sometimes afraid to touch or laugh; you may as well ask why my name is pronounced how it is. And sometimes fear and the past and the pain just do not require validation. I still am scared and my past has etched upon my skin the verses of the seasons I have lived through. I can’t love without reservation. But I can be brave and I can love you in my way; if you’ll just promise not to ask me why.

Looking back I see the way I came though I do not wish to turn around, my heart can not take the past anymore so forward steps I take, only to look forward to see I have not moved. My path is stuck, my road is blocked by the never ending pain of the past so go forward I don't. Pain doesn't leave and the happiest keep their eyes locked on dirt below.

Here we had a spectacle, bought and paid for by heavy-handed, glassy eyed jade statues pounding ceremonious fists against withered drums. The instruments boomed ancient tones of wrath while straining under their own heavy weight, for they had heard a thousand cracks and seen a thousand bloody souls caught within their taut insides. Yet, one more was not going to make much of a difference, and perhaps they worried flames would consume their might if they did not persist in their sacrifices. Yes, I went to jump off of the banister to watch as the rope curled its way around my neck appreciatively, a viper who’d spent years wondering where its life had gone, but whose regret died when new prey walked into, and was caught, in its throat. The man behind the counter who’d offered me a poisoned beer and told me the story of Romeo and Juliet smirked and winked from the audience, coupled with a few tears from the back alley drug dealer I’d given a few dollars to in exchange for the air we were breathing. You found this all out the hard way, but I imagine crying to 80s rom-coms with smooth masculine voices pouring sugary diabetes over your bucket of ice cream gave you some kind of a defense. However, if you were hoping to exchange last words by hospital beds with feeding tubes inserted into our mouths, crying under the explosions of 4th of July fireworks and frantic hospital staff, I’m sorry to disappoint you. A picture is worth a thousand noises. I don’t know how much a snap is worth, or closed eyes, or hands yanked about like they were struck through with a puppet’s strings, but it was enough for me – the accused political prisoner, now hangman. Was it for you?

The will
The will to speak, the will to eat, the will to get up in the morning. Gone. But outside the blue house with the uncut lawn the world keeps turning and turning without end. And the girl inside can no longer pretend she's okay. She can no longer remain inside without the light of day. Thinking about what she has become, blinking back tears. Sitting on an unmade bed she cries. The girl with the light fading from her eyes. She stares at the ceiling considering her life and how much of it has been lived in the shadow of strife. A mind that would count all the stars that could glisten really just needed somebody to listen. Belief in miracles belief in dreams could take power from her silent screams. Hope gave her a hunger a yearning. Hope could help her climb the tower of unsolved problems and broken dreams. She would not let her world be ripped apart at the seams. She climbed and she fought and she ran to one day be whole again. Now she is a girl that tries and finally the light is back in her eyes.