So what is this page?
I’ve taken a lot of inspiration on this page from those that did something similar before me. The whole intention behind this page is simply a resource dump for all of the thoughts that come to my head and the writings that I’m not confident enough to make a post out of. This page will be updated regularly, (hopefully at least) and I’ll do my best not to abandon it.
Author’s Note: This is an emulation of an emulation, funnily enough. It’s based off of an emulation that my teacher read to us in class, and I decided to make my own version of it. The original poem was The Jews that We Are, and the emulation I based this off of was The Women that We Are
i) I am seven years old,
and my friend has just told me
that she likes a boy.
Even though he teases her
and chases her
and he makes fun of her.
In the sweltering noonday sun
with her face flushed,
she admits that she wants to kiss him.
Even though we are too young
the idea of romance
has been ingrained in our minds.
Enforced onto us,
shoved down our throats
until we have no choice
but to accept it.
ii) I am still seven
and I’ve learned
that the sidewalk is too short
to accommodate three people
walking side by side.
I walk behind my parents,
resentful of them.
I watch my mother
berate my father
and wonder
if this is what ‘love’ is.
To have no siblings
to confide in
is a tragedy,
to have no one
to walk alongside me
when my parents
hold hands and leave me
to chase them up the sidewalk
is a tragedy.
iii) I am eight,
and a boy is bullying me.
Upset with his petty insults,
I tell my parents
but am met with the words,
“He must like you,
all boys tease girls that they like.”
Defiant, I refuse
to accept their words.
This isn’t love, this is hatred.
iv) I am nine.
This boy is still in my class.
I am still told
that is his insults are compliments
and his berating is affection.
I decide
that if this is love,
I do not want it.
v) I am eleven
and my resentment is growing.
My friend is ignoring me
for a boy.
I am second best,
the support I’ve given her
for years, is nothing
in comparison
to his temporary affection
and his hollow compliments.
My friendship is nothing to her.
I vow to never turn out like that.
I vow to never diminish my friends
for the sake of a boy.
vi) I am twelve
and my mother is concerned.
I haven’t fallen in love yet.
Desperately grasping at straws,
she pulls out a stack of photos,
photos of “attractive” actors,
and she asks me which ones
I think are attractive.
Scowling, I say none.
vii) I am fourteen
and I’ve found it
I have cracked the code.
Unearthed the secret with my bare hands
clawing at the dirt until my nails tore
and my fingers bled,
I found the name.
Aromantic.
One that doesn’t experience romantic attraction.
I try to tell people,
but I’m told I’m too young to decide
that this is my title.
viii) I am sixteen.
There is someone.
Someone I wish I didn’t meet,
because I think I’ve broken my vow
to never fall in love.
My foolish heart
thinks that I’m in love.
But sick jealousy,
and twisting in my gut
is not love.
Lust for nothing
but a pretty face,
is not love,
but my ignorance
tells me otherwise.
How can you fall in love
when you don’t know what it is?
How can you fall in love
when you don’t know how to love?
ix) I am seventeen.
And I have aged a decade
in just a year.
Pain ages the soul,
bruising of the heart,
scarring of the mind.
The pain of forcing yourself to love
is the worst way to hurt yourself.
This self inflicted heartbreak
has broken me in ways
that will take much too long to heal.
x) I have been told
time and time again
that falling in love is the greatest thing
that will ever happen to me.
Perhaps, for some it is,
but for myself,
someone that doesn’t know
how to even love herself,
it is not.
– The Love that Wasn’t
Let go of him, my dear friend
you’re clinging to him;
clinging to him until your hands blister
and your fingers break.
This loving,
is doing you nothing but harm.
You’re breathing in
his toxic air
and telling yourself
it’s good for you.
But you don’t see
your heart shrivelling
and your ribcage crumbling.
You don’t want to hear it
but you’re not his anymore.
Maybe your fingers
just didn’t fit right between his
or maybe there was too much
darkness in both of you
for there to be a balance.
You don’t want to hear it
but you’re not the one for him.
You didn’t have the means to fix him
and no matter what you tell yourself,
that’s okay.
It’s okay not to be the one,
it will hurt at first,
but all wounds heal with time,
you think losing him
was the end of the world.
But it’s not.
One day the platelets in your blood
will cluster around the gash
that he left in your heart
and with spindles
weaving in between each other
they will seal your wound.
Your shattered ribcage
will rebuild itself from the ashes,
and you’ll finally breathe again.
Strength will lace itself
across your once broken arms,
and you’ll crawl out of this pit
with torn fingernails and bruised feet,
but that too will heal.
But only if you let go.
Only if you let go,
will you realize that you’re strong.
Because it takes strength
to hold onto someone that harmed you,
but it takes even more courage to let go.
You’re afraid you’ll see
the world differently.
That he will leave a hole in you
that can never be repaired.
But he won’t.
Muscle and sinew will soon fill it.
Bones will reform,
and soon you won’t feel
a breath of wind
through that once gaping void.
You’re better than this,
and I know it.
You have the courage to let go,
you’re strong.
Look around
there’s more to this world
than a love that once was.
– What Once Was
I will not be remembered, the impact I leave on the world will be nothing more than a raindrop in the vast cosmos of the ocean. I am a mere whisper in an uproar of shouts. When I die, I will melt into the shadows of Asphodel, what little good I have done will be a mere fleck of dust in the Sahara. Not good enough for Elysium, but not evil enough for Tartarus. So what does it matter what my eulogy says? I am no one’s lover, no one’s murderer, and no one’s mother; the daughter of two nobodies, and someone with too little talent to be recognized. Always second best to a sibling that was never born, full of shades of grey and maybes. Do not cry at my funeral, because like the rest of us, I will soon fade away, eroded by the waves of time, until I am nothing but grains of sand in a river.
– A Shadow’s Eulogy
Author’s Note: This was inspired from a seminar we had today in creative writing on the author Betty Smith. This is vaguely emulated from an excerpt from her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This emulation is based off of my favourite novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and I decided to incorporate several motifs, themes and elements of the novel into this piece.
Chaotic was a word you could put to Manhattan, New York, especially during the winter of 1949. When the snow cluttered the streets, the pond in Central Park froze over halfway, and jazz bands could be heard blaring from inside bars; chaotic was the best word to describe it. Because in this time, you’re stuck in between, half frozen, half water, strung in a limbo between adolescence and adulthood. You’re lost in the streets of Manhattan looking for a friendly face. Wanting the independence of adulthood, yet scared you’ll become a phony like the dull eyed adults. You keep asking yourself if you’re the only one confused, scared and frightened by human behavior, is there someone, anyone out there in the blinding chaos of these city lights that sees all of this? Or are you alone in this vast ocean of cigarette scented taxicabs and gleaming, brass carousels?
I set my arms on the railing and look up at the sky. It’s peaceful here at night. The sea can be faintly heard in the distance. If you strain your ears enough, and try to listen about the hum of the nearby highway, you can hear the waves crashing against the surf. Wind ruffles the trees, causing a cascade of leaves to be torn from their trembling branches before clattering against the side of the school. Upwards, in the indigo sky, the few bold stars that are stronger than the streetlights are strung in spindly patterns across the deep blue void. A smile breaks my face. For once, the coastal sky isn’t clogged with rainclouds; it’s clear enough that the stars are visible, even if it’s just a few. Resting my chin on my arms, I gaze up longingly at the scattered constellations.
When I was younger, in a hysteria-induced fit after moving here, desperate to return home, I told my father I wanted to be a constellation so I could get away from this rainy, unfamiliar place where even the snow fell differently. I wanted to be chained to the stars like the ill fated Cassiopeia. After I shouted this to my father, he told me that I shouldn’t want to be a constellation. Instead, he said I should be the moon. Through my tears, I asked him why. He picked me up, set me on the couch next to him, and began to explain.
“Constellations are lightyears away, you’d never be able to see our home again if you were a constellation. Earth would just be a tiny fleck of light in the distance, just like Orion’s belt. Besides, your eyes are the same colour as the moon, it suits you more.”
To appease me, my father bought me a telescope, set it out on the back porch on the night of a full moon, and told me to look at the sky with it. Blinking, I banish the memory. The same autumn sky sits above me, although the moon is a waning gibbous, not a full moon like that night. This isn’t the back porch of my house either, it’s the rooftop of the school and I’m standing up here with a boy I barely know, but he seems to be just as enraptured by the stars as I am.
He looks over at me with a curious expression, “Enjoying the scenery?”
“Hardly. I see it everyday.”
– Excerpt 1
I am not nostalgic in the way that my mother is.
I don’t cry when the time comes to say goodbye to a person, time or place, in the way that she does.
In fact, I refuse to say goodbye, I turn around and do not look back. I refuse to be sensitive, I refuse to let a petty transition in my life affect me at all.
Life changes, and that is a fact we should come to accept. You can preserve those moments all you like in photos, trying to cling onto what once was, but the fact remains that you will never get that back. Time marches on without any sense of sympathy.
Once in a while, however, I will hear a song, or see an object that brings me back to that time. A certain chord struck in a song will tug at my beaten down heartstrings. Perhaps, I’ll see an object that reminds me of who I once was. Most of the time, it’s something odd, like a worn out goalpost in a school field. It’ll remind me of how I used to roam the edges of the field with my friends, back in junior high, and how we would always try to climb the rickety white goalposts, only to be scolded by the recess supervisors, saying it was dangerous.
Suddenly, I’ll find myself crying at one in the morning, five years later listening to an Owl City song, remembering how happy I used to be. Or I’ll find myself tearing up in the car as I drive past a junior high that isn’t even my own, remembering how life once seemed so easy.
That is how I am nostalgic.
– Looking Back
I feel that losing someone hurts more when it just fades away.
Instead of ending with a bang,
Ending with a fight full of tears and rage,
It just fades away.
You start seeing each other less
They stop smiling at you in the hallways,
Your conversations become less frequent,
Until it fades into nothing.
– I don’t want us to end up like this
Places where reality feels slightly altered #1:
– Roadside diners
– Stage theaters late at night
– Schools after hours or on weekends
– Downtown streets at night
– Train stations
Author’s Note: This segment is inspired by this post I saw on Tumblr. I felt that the post didn’t cover a full and comprehensive list so I decided to start a small segment on this page where I write about even more places that give me this strange feeling.
Author’s Note: Though this is not a direct emulation, this poem was inspired by Frog Prince, and I cannot find the poem online or the author’s name anywhere for the life of me, I apologize for not being able to give credit where it is due. That aside, I sort of used the tongue-in-cheek tone that the author used for this poem. We were discussing the topic of fairy tales and how we used to read them as children in class, and I mention my belief (or lack thereof) that I had as child in this poem. Though I was an avid believer in dragons, fairies and the likes, for some unknown reason, I adamantly did not believe in Santa at all as child, and this is what the poem is about, in the spirit of the season.
There never was a time
where I believed in that
strange, fat man in a red suit
that somehow flew around the globe
in one night, delivering presents.
Being the preachy, obnoxious girl
that I was at that age,
I got on my soapbox
and began to spread the truth
like some sort of zealous cultist,
and really, at that age,
you were a cultist
if you didn’t believe in Santa.
“He’s not real, how can he be?”
I would say,
spouting scientific facts.
“He can’t fit down the chimney,
he can’t fly to every country in one night.
It’s not realistic.”
When my family friends asked,
“Was Santa good to you?”
I would stick up my chin
and refute their lies.
“He’s not real,
I know that gift was from you.”
– Ever the Cynic