Young Writers Society

Deep breath and falling. Soft stuffed animals, an even softer pillow, you feel how it surrounds you. Smell, that penetrating smell of your mother's perfume when she gives you a kiss. Then you stand up and look outside. You sort everything by color. Blue or gray skies, maybe just black, maybe burning yellow from the sun. Gray or black are good days. Blue or yellow are not. 

They see a basketball, you see an orange ball that turns, as the Earth beneath your feet. The Earth is covered by a gray sheet with white stripes, what they call a basketball court. Why all those difficult words? Colors are easier to sort, see, understand, feel and describe. It is autumn and the ground is covered by rotting orange spots. Other people see their children – their little angels – and all you see are screaming monsters with snakes. They scream that goddesses with caverns, like you, aren’t allowed to throw the ball through the hoop. You don’t care.

At home, your room is very big, bigger than those of others. Through the floor, you hear thunderclaps and echoes. Grandma is visiting again. You fire a small transparent disc from one robot to the other. Robots – they are better. In their world there are no fights, they don’t scream at each other. Their world doesn’t have angry grandmothers with clawed hands and burning eyes that want to take you away from your parents. They don’t have ugly monsters making the difference between snakes in shorts and caverns in dresses.

The robot falls.

You laugh.

You laugh again while a fist lands on your cheek. They feel the muscles, the bones. For you, it is nothing else but colors. Pink cheek on a pink face and then your pink turns blue. The small monsters look older now, but inside they are still the same. They still – even more than ever – make the difference between snakes and caverns. You are weird because your hair is short and spiky. That is wrong, that is what they say. You hit back. You feel something shatter, something triangular and see red exploding on the pink.

A monster, like the others, but older, screams at you. You see a monster where they see a teacher. You don’t hear him – too busy watching the small monster. He tries to stop the red dripping river with his hand. Colorless water runs over his cheeks. That water mixes with the bits of red to make them brighter. That water is salty, you have tasted it before. The older monster grabs your hand and asks for something. The green rectangle that he calls an agenda. You watch how he grabs a blue sticker and begins forming shapes inside the green book, on the black lines crossing it. You know that your mother will scream at you tonight because the mother of that monster called her again. They'll talk again about troubled kids and something called a council. You don’t care about what they say to her. Mama is permanently angry or so it seems and Grandma has gotten better. Coarse sides are gone, softer with the time.

You come home late, hoping to avoid your mother. First, you sit, looking over at everything, from your personal mountain. They see nothing but a common roof, you see your personal palace. You are the queen of this kingdom from glass and concrete. White-orange sticks that become bright orange before they shrink, they are your best friends. Even if they sting your tongue. They and still the robots. The robots are better because the monsters that give you the sticks in exchange for your allowance still make the difference between caverns and snakes. They say that you look too young to buy the sticks, they ask you where your mother is. You don’t care.

Sometimes you think that you look like the monsters that catch you in the halls between the classrooms and hit you. When you look in the mirror, reflection, a world within the glass.

The classrooms, you don’t like them either. Older goddesses – like you, with caverns – tell you that the world is something, that one should try to understand it and live in it. You don’t understand them. The world is mostly nothing because the goddesses and the monsters that walk in the world are mostly nothing. And if those that walk within the world are nothing, how can the world be something?

Your room is just as big as it used to be, but now it is filled with more stuff, mostly more robots. You now also have a rectangle, glas and iron, that you received as a present from grandma. You light it up when you come home after school, every evening.

Every evening on it there appears a goddess, living in a sunny village. She destroys her own monsters. But her monsters are different, they drink blood, they have horns and sharp teeth.

Sometimes you like to think that you are her. And that your monsters have horns and teeth. Because that would it make easier to live in and to understand this world. To feel this world. But your world isn’t hers, it is this, different, filled with snakes and caverns, red and pink. It is like this now and will forever stay this way.