Young Writers Society

 After our parents - who stood as two rocks on our side - parted their bodies to reveal a crevice, we fell from the heavens, towards the arms of mother and father.

Our first sight of the world was at the centre, between mother and father’s sturdy foundations that were rooted deep in the ground.

We clung, buried into their arms and they embraced us, their kisses and hugs raining on our chubby bodies. We would kick and gurgle in response while our parents smiled, their breath breathing a melody in reply. Our eyes will look up to their eyes wanting to capture their voices into ours, and mimic their movements in the world.

Time and growth caught up with us and we had to leave our parents shadow to fall from their height into the river. Without their arms encircling our small bodies and their voices whispering sweet sentiments we were left with the terrors borne from our imagination. Our round eyes would water and leak raining fear on the ground while our chubby lips would quiver and bawl…

Until we noticed that there were no monsters hiding in the dark, or witches hiding in the cupboard. Instead there were other droplets, clear and transparent like us and together we held each other’s hands while the sun’s rays spread across the clear sky. We glowed in return, a colourful prism of hope and dreams. Up from our side of the hill we could see the entire world and we saw that the world was our oyster.

We rolled further downhill, together swimming into the bends and folds of the river passing fertile grass as green as our hopes that we held closely to our hearts.

But Teacher Autumn came like wind scattering decaying leaves mixed with abandoned broken bottles and empty wrappers felled from people’s careless hands into our clear transparent stream:

It screamed: “You got a C in your exam and you want to be a future innovator? You’ll never be an innovator!”

Autumn’s clouds hid our sun and rained sulfuric and nitric acid that eroded our dreams and youthful idealism. We were left numb, frozen in the beginnings of an icy winter.

“Why don’t you train to be a labourer instead?” the wind suggested. Teacher Autumn had trapped our dreams and flung it to the winds where it fluttered a hundred thousand miles away.

We continued our flow, weaving in between rocks, dirt and debris staining our transparency, we were no longer clear eyed but tainted with brown, grey and black. We passed bridges and villages filled with innocent star eyed children. They would stick their creamy coloured hands in the river until their parents’ angry words burned tears in their eyes, forcing them to withdraw their hands.

Elderly couples strolling for a walk would salute us and chat about our youthful lives, their cloudy eyes romantically blinded with the nostalgia of their distant youth.

“Have a sweet,” they offered after listening to an edited version of our dreams.

We finished our diplomas and our minds was dulled with thought - we didn’t see the left or right route, only the bends and folds ahead- plunged downhill into a tributary university.

There, we found different shades of black, grey, brown, yellow who had travelled from other small streams that led back to crevices from all over the world. Together we formed a river that was wider and shorter in length. We bubbled for the first time in nightclubs where we drank our sorrows and lived in artificial drunken joy. The moonlight became the sun that shone on our subconscious hopes, that we revealed unconsciously, and in the morning when the lecturer arrived our hands slathered slowly underneath the desk as our minds slipped into a daydream,

that unfurled too quickly into an estuary, the slipperiness, the closeness of the fall into the ocean awoken us from our daydreams and we scrabbled quickly to find a traineeship or graduate scheme.

Maybe our hands, academic history and/or experience were truly made of water because we found that our grip was weak and we tumbled into the ocean of recessive depression.

We were too transparent to earn a well-paying job, and no matter how much we stained our hands in filth washing dishes in the café, or blowing dust off stock in the stockroom to display in the shop we still had minus money and experience to pay back the debt we owed University,

We wished that we were still the college students elderly people sometimes mistaken us for, they saw that our face was still clear, but with words exchanged they saw that we were nearly grey from tiredness,

“Have a sweet,” they offered, drenching us in sympathy, while we drowned into the bottom of the ocean, slaving at our menial jobs. Every day our minds feasted on the sliver of youthful clarity that shrunk by day. It prayed for the sun to melt us so we could rise as evaporation to the heights of the skies because:

Each tomorrow came with a wintry dread that burnt our skins dry and slashed bloody cuts into the dying skins of our hands. We are afraid that soon the poisonous debris that Teacher Autumn had injected into our skin would soon fill every cell we had with greying debris.

and our hearts will learn to freeze in the depths of winter.