Category: Junior Literary

Here’s the thing: I really enjoy writing blogs. I like that the whole class and the seniors can see them if they want to. The point of the blogs is to be able to share what you’ve experienced and tell your opinion on matters.

This is my whole problem with having to have a certain amount done a week. I can watch the news all day long and still not feel like I have something to comment on or tell my opinion about. I’ve been alive for seventeen years but that doesn’t mean I have a plethora of stories that I think are blog worthy. I like to put a lot of effort into the topics of my blogs and even more effort into the research I do for the blogs I do when I comment on today’s events.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m stuck on campus, unable to hear and see new things or talk to new people. I can’t hear their stories or opinions, which is where I get a lot of my story prompts from. It makes it more difficult to get the full extent of a story or concept, when there’s no one to compare with.

Also, I don’t like constantly writing about sad and dark things that make you stare at the wall or forget how to come up with a sentence. I like writing about happy things that make people smile or at least not feel so down about life. And with my usual writing it’s usually the first of the two that ends up happening inadvertently, which is not my intention, so it takes extra time to convey my stories/poems/opinions in upbeat terms.

In saying that, it kind of makes it look like I’m coming up with excuses, which I might subconsciously be doing, but not on purpose. I tend to take a lot of pride in my writing, despite what I say, and I want it to be the best it can be. I want people to really think and remember what I’ve given them. It sounds like I’m being a attention seeker or that my writing’s worth depends on the accounts of others but that is also not what I’m trying to say. It’s just, if someone is going to take the time to read something of mine, I want it to be worth it.

This blog is sort of all over the place, but I feel like it tells what I’m trying to get across. Hopefully.

Blissful Things I Love About Autumn 

(And The Songs I Associate With Them)

• Over-sized Sweaters
• Fuzzy Socks
• Pumpkin Patches
• Carving Pumpkins
• Hot Chocolate
• Tea
• Fall Candles
• Halloween
• Discount Halloween Candy
• Apple Picking
• Camping
• Hiking 
• Bonfires
• Thanksgiving
• Football Games 
• Scenic Drives 

I talk to myself and it isn’t just running into a wall and screaming that I’m an idiot, because I had already done it three times that day and it was getting kinda ridiculous. No. When I talk to myself I do it everyday and all day. Full conversations. I talk about my feelings to myself and I would give myself advice. I would talk about how strange a person may look and go back in forth in my own mind about if that person is pretty or not. I have conversations to people who i know and its as if they are there when they are not. Sometimes it gets distracting when I talk to myself during a test about if dinosaurs really existed, test forgotten, and mind wandering. And before I know it the bell rings and I get nothing done. Sometimes the voice I hear that talks back isn’t even mine, but this other girl talking back, and we talk for hours and days and sometimes before I go to bed I have a habit of  saying Goodnight to be polite. She says it back, and I fall sleep feeling content that I made friends with this me. Who I had stopped calling me because that’s rude instead I give her another name “Cecil”. This girl, who I am fully aware that is me is nice, she is kind, argumentative at times, but seems to pop up at my most depressed times or my most lonely but now a days exist in every state I am in. And I can’t call her an imaginary friend, because I can’t see her. I can just listen to her and if anything, I believe that’s better. Now, I have looked this up repeatedly. Trying to pinpoint why I do this and if anyone else has done this kind of thing before. When I did I found out that yes people do. But I could never find someone who did it exactly like I did which was strange, but could also be the case of people not wanting to say anything from fear of being called out. I’m fine with that honestly, I accept that reality. But no, I’m not crazy, I don’t think so at least. I believe this is more of a coping mechanism. When I was younger and preferred playing with my siblings who at the times were too busy or my parents who had to work more often than not. So, what else could a child do but talk to herself day in and day out to keep from feeling sad and lonely? So, I grew up like that and even when I was getting attention talking to myself never did phase out of existence if anything, it heightened to a much larger level. Because I realized that the only person who would listen to me would be me. So now it seems that I am stuck in this eternal battle with myself who I can’t shake because without this I feel like the world would implode and I would truly be alone. When i would force myself to stop listening the quite would be suffocating. The world would come into such a sharp focus that i seemed to be split between the desolate and the sporadic. I would always go back to myself and the voice that seemed to soothe my head and carry me back into the hazy world that has no real consequences or concrete facts. I liked that me better.

I am sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake.  I have no oars, but I have something in my pocket.  It is sunset.  The black silhouettes of trees pop-out against the sky which is a kaleidoscopic mish-mash of oranges, reds, and purples.  With every passing minute, the harsh reds slowly fade away to be replaced by deep purples and blues.  I am waiting for the sun to disappear, and you do not know why.

I hold all of the power in the world.  No, not in my pocket, but in my hands that type this story.  You know not why I am sitting here in this boat.  You don’t know how I got here.  You don’t know why I am waiting for the night to fall, and you don’t know what will happen when it does.  You don’t even know what I have hidden away in my pocket, but I have a secret, I don’t know either.  I created this scenario, but I have yet to create the steps that brought me to the center of this lake.  I seem as powerless as you to destiny then, don’t I?  Well, that’s where you’re wrong.

I am this world’s sculptor.  I took clay made of ideas and shaped it into an insanely, insignificantly minute moment that is in itself, so much.  In a life, this moment could be one of the most important moments, but in the course of the universe, it would change nothing.  This contrast of importance split by reality and perception really fascinates me.  Not only is this story that to the characters but to myself.  I have come to a realization in writing this that has somewhat altered my idea of life’s finity.  I know that this does not affect the universe at large in any way, but that’s part of the realization.

I stand up in the boat.  I feel almost as if there are eyes on me.  I turn all around, but find only that I am completely alone.  I reach into my pocket.  The sky is now completely dark.  My hand touches something, and my fingers wrap slowly around it.  I pull it out fiercely and hurl it into the water where it immediately sinks.  The glass-top lake is shattered with fierce ripples that gradually smooth out.  I sit back down in the boat, staring at the sky, and wait until I am a part of it.  I’m still waiting.

I miss being five years old. I miss having no worries in the world other than finding a way to get out of eating my peas at dinner that night. I miss it being acceptable to take a nap during school, when we couldn’t be penalized for being tired because we woke up at the crack of dawn to go to class. I miss being friends with everyone because when you’re a kid, everyone gets along with one another, when there was no such thing as society’s standards in our minds. I miss being able to go to sleep at seven at night and wake up absolutely fine in the morning – no insomnia-filled nights where it feels as though sleeping will only be something I do when I die. I miss when the worst thing you could do to a person was stick your tongue out at them and not share any of your Popsicle. I miss when the world was filled with people who actually interacted with one another, rather than scrolling through social media all day, their noses buried in their phones (which I admit I do as well). I miss when my days consisted of eating, sleeping, sitting down with my family and going right back to sleep again. I miss having absolutely no reason to stress; hell, I miss not even knowing what stress is. I miss not even knowing about the existence of anxiety and panic attacks and depression and suicide. I want to wake up and not have the one thing I look forward to be the weekend so that I can just sit back and do pretty much nothing. I miss when I did not hate my body because it belonged to a “young woman.” I want to go back to when politics did not even exist to me because I was too young to know what they were, when TV was just a thing that you watched for entertainment and I did not get emotionally attached to fictional characters that I cry over when they die. I miss when we were all brutally honest with one another because children’s mouths have no filter, and we got to actually sleep when we were tired. I want to go back to a time where the biggest issue was if I colored inside the lines, rather than if I accidentally used cosine instead of tangent or the formula for gravitational potential energy as a substitute for that of kinetic energy. I miss the simpler times, when there was no fear of growing up and being on my own in just a matter of years and having to get a job probably within the next few months because I’m legally old enough to now. The time when our problems consisted of how many cookies we could have after dinner and how late we could get our parents to let us stay up – maybe past ten if you’re lucky. Man, do I wish I could go back.

Dear you (again),

You come back to me a month after we last talked, saying that you’re sorry? You’re sorry? You should be sorry. You made me feel like I wasn’t a person – like I deserved to be treated exactly as you did towards me on that last day we spoke. After you went on your little rant, talking about how I was a narcissist, how I never listened to anything you said, how I always talk like I am asking you for pity. I’m sorry, but I do not want your pity. You misunderstood my intention, and I cannot help that. I never said that I thought you were stupid when I had to repeat whatever it was that I had just said; it never even crossed my mind – those words came from you, not me. I never intended to make you feel that way, but you clearly wanted me to feel as horribly as you did about a month and a half ago.

Honestly, I’m not so sure I should have forgiven you as easily as I did. Maybe I only did it because I missed you. I missed having more than one person to talk to about whatever I wanted to. I missed being able to look at my phone and smile whenever I saw a message from that person I’d been waiting to hear from all day. I probably shouldn’t have. But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t help but miss you because you made me feel like everything was okay. Anytime I got to talk to you, I would get this huge, stupid grin on my face, and I would completely forget whatever had been bothering me. And it never seemed like that to you, I guess, because I’m terrible at expressing my feelings to other people. But trust me, it’s the truth; I have no reason to lie about this.

As an example of what you do to me, let’s talk about this: every time I would get a notification on my phone, I would secretly hope that it was you, even in that time we did not speak for a month. And when it was? Jeez, when it was  you, I felt like one of those giddy teenage girls that people always make fun of on movies and sit-coms. I’ve never had that feeling before. And I feel weird just typing it out, knowing that some of my classmates very well may read it. But it’s the truth. I don’t want it to be, but it is. I’m usually the type of person to hold grudges – believe me – and this one, I can’t seem to even mend, which is typically the easiest part for me.

Sincerely,

someone who wishes that when they said goodbye, they meant it

I feel really great.  I’m happy, and I don’t really know why.  Nothing has really happened to make me feel like this, but I just do regardless of reason.  Last week, I don’t know why, but I felt really down.  People say that you decide the kind of day that you have, but I’ve found that that is absolutely untrue.  I tried everything I could to be happy, but I just couldn’t, and this week, I feel the way that I had been trying to without any of the effort I’d wasted last week.  I really don’t understand how emotions work, and I’d be fine with that if I know that I’d continue to feel the way that I do.  Of course I don’t and can’t know that.  I think I just have ups and downs.  I don’t know why it is the way it is, but it still is.  I think people like to tell themselves that they can control how they feel just to feel like they have more control over themselves than they really do, or maybe they actually do.  Maybe that’s just the way that I see things because I assume that the way things affect me is the way that they affect everybody.  I guess that that’s kind of a pretentious assumption, but I only really have my own perception to work with when figuring out how others operate.  I really don’t know that I do understand how others operate.  I’ll begin to think that I’m not like other people because I’ll think that I don’t like what other people like.  Say, for instance, parties; I always thought that I just didn’t really like parties.  I never understood why other people did, but recently that’s changed.  I’ve gone to parties where I was much closer with the people there, and I genuinely enjoyed them.  It makes me think that I am like others but just haven’t figured it out yet entirely, but that’s not all.  It makes me wonder if some of the stranger things that I like would be liked by others if they were exposed to them.  Maybe if other people tried it out, they’d enjoy watching terrible movies from the 70’s that have been posted on YouTube because the rightsholders don’t care enough to take them because they know that nobody would be willing to pay money to see them.  Maybe more people would enjoy playing old video games on consoles that don’t work with modern televisions if they could try them out, and not just the classics like Mario and Sonic games but games like Bonk’s Adventure on the TurboGrafx-16 which sold really poorly in the U.S.  Maybe that’s just where I really am different, but there’s a chance that it’s not.  There’s a part of me that really wishes people were more different.  I feel like these things are part of what makes me who I am, but I know that I can enjoy what others enjoy if I decide to.  Sometimes, it just seems like if I want to be able to relate to others, I have to hold back a part of myself.

rococo // arcade fire

growing up in the suburbs, you see people gain and lose their individuality. you watch sense of selves fade and meld from all these different beaming colors into one uniform shade of grey.

it’s sad, really. to see kids whose eyes used to be so wildly and unabashedly optimistic start turning to the same dull sheen that overtook their parents’ eyes all those years ago.

everyone just settles. they settle for in-state colleges and universities because of the scholarship opportunities, or at least a college that’s only a half-hour from the state line. they settle for moving two towns over rather than two states over. no one ever seems to allow themselves the privilege to explore the world outside familiar subdivisions and farmers’ markets.

but me, i’ve never been one to settle. i’ve always been one to dream outside of suburbia. i’ve always blatantly refused even contemplating attending any school anywhere near mississippi. not even ole miss, a school renowned for its writing programs.

i don’t want to be stuck like everyone else is. much like the queen song, i want to break free. i don’t want to be stuck singing the same songs and saying the same things and letting my colors meld into that same shade of grey that everyone else has let themselves be painted in.

i don’t like where i live. i never really have liked where i live. it’s why i came here. and it’s why i want to leave still. i want to see a welcome to mississippi sign for the last time and never once dream of looking back.

now, this doesn’t mean forgetting where i come from. this doesn’t mean leaving my family or my friends behind. it means allowing myself the ability to see more than what’s familiar. it means allowing myself to meet new people and make new friends and form new families. i want to give myself room to breathe, and suburbia has been choking me since the moment i set foot on its well-watered grass.

to me, staying would be conforming, and i’ve never really been much of a conformist. even when i try to fit in with everyone else, the edges just don’t fit right. all of my puzzles pieces are jagged and wrong, probably even from a completely different box.

i’m just trying to find the rest of my puzzle pieces, and they aren’t here.

My life flashes before my eyes,

except it’s not just mine,

it’s my brother’s and my mom’s,

it’s my best friends’,

and even my dog’s.

There’s nothing remotely interesting about the events that I see,

except when I see your face,

and the way the scar on your chin tilted to the left when you smiled,

how when you laughed,

the whole world stopped to marvel at the sound,

of such a happy and joyous tune,

and the rhythm of the way you breathe flies past my ears,

and I can’t help but wonder why I don’t write more sappy poetry,

about the times we spent together,

but I think that would defeat the purpose of gooey poetry,

because you’re gone,

and all of my mushy words turn to heartache,

that I’m not completely ready to accept yet.

So screw words and lines full of the almost L word,

that was on the tip of both of our tongues.