05-30-2015, 11:11 AM
Sorry its so freaking long...wrote it recently for my 8th grade LA final. Had to read it in class.......NOT FUN. Anyways, i know its long but i would really appreciate any feedback 
I have always considered myself an independent person. I walk to the bus by myself, I make dinner by myself, and I watch movies at the little local drive-in by myself. But my mother told me to never go out into the water without another person, and so I never did. Our little island was one of many in a vast, lonely ocean. The water there was dark, thick. Malicious. If you got caught too deep or in a strong current, you and your body were gone forever. Not even remembered. So I stayed on the island, watching movies and eating at cafes with friends. But one fall, I had to go into the water. One fall, I had to break my mother’s rule.
“Freya? Please step out into the hall,” my teacher called from the front of class. The office assistant outside said something to me. The exact words she used are lost in my memory now, but I knew they meant something had happened. Something was wrong with Mom. I raced through town, barely registering the familiar sights of weary seamen at bars and worn down wives plodding to and from the local store. I skidded around the bend in our driveway, racing to the living room and my mother’s side. I grasped her hands in mine and asked what was wrong.
“It’s my heart again,” my mom wheezed, “Remember last time? I had to get that medicine from the other island. But then your father was here to go…” Her eyes pleaded with me.
I nodded, ignoring the stab of pain at the mention of Dad. “Where’s the emergency money?”
By the time I had packed all the money we had, moved my mom into her bed, and shoved some food and water into a bag, I had almost come to terms with the idea of going that far in the sea, alone. I was almost excited. I had always wanted to be by myself.
I jogged back through town and went right up to an old sailor who rented out boats. I told him I needed a small craft to go to the next island to the west. I could pay him now. His empty eyes rose painfully to meet mine.
“You don’t know what it does to you,” he whispered. I noticed his worn and scarred body for the first time.
“It gets your soul first. People say that only the weak ones fall in, but really it takes strength to resist at all. Please. Don’t go,”
Scared, I replied, “I have to. I will fight. I am not the type to succumb.”
Before I could lose hope, I pushed off in the first rowboat I saw. And then I was… alone.
I look back now at the events of that fall, and wish I had done so many things differently. Brought more supplies, asked for advice, taken a nicer craft, gotten someone to come with me, anything.
I headed away from safety, west towards the sun. Here, I stopped to take a look at the feared sea. The sky was grey and clear, but clouds were heading my direction from the horizon. I felt I could smell rain on the wind. The boat was wooden and rough, as any boat would be if a girl came and took it while distracted. The view was serene and pleasant, if only one could avoid looking at the water. Waves in this part of the world are rounded and slow, not the fabled versions of beaches they say exist elsewhere. The water was dark, black, and heavy, almost like corn syrup. They say it sucks your soul first, and then gets your body when you are too miserable to go on. I, at my young age, had thought the old men sitting by the sidewalks were telling stories. That their scars and bruises were from some other horror. Something so evil just could not be. Now, I was not so sure.
And then I saw the puddle. A seam had opened in the side of my boat, and water was trickling in. I cupped my hands to bail it out, and it was then that I believed the stories. As I put my hands over the side to get rid of the filthy water, a voice called faintly in my head. Come, it said, it was warm down here. Do you really want to stay where you are? I roughly pulled back, scratching my arms on the wood as I moved to the center of my boat. The voice had a good point. I was cold. Why would I want to go back to my island and live in fear of the water, just to try and nurse my mother back to health? This surprised me, for immediately I thought, but I love her! I looked warily at the water. It had tried, but I was not going to listen again.
Meanwhile, darkness had been quietly dripping in through the crack in the wood, soaking me, and my boat sat lower in the water than before. I steeled myself, and started bailing it out. The voice was gone at first. I thought I had defeated it and started to relax. This was my mistake. Rolls of horrible words etched my brain as I struggled to keep myself afloat.
Finally, I realized my mistake. I had always wanted to be by myself. I had never wanted to be alone. Feeling independent and feeling lonely are very different. Independence makes one feel whole. Like they don’t need another person to survive. It is invigorating, liberation. But loneliness is very different. Feeling alone is like feeling fractured. You feel broken, but broken in a way that nobody will help you. At this point, you need another person to survive and you need help. And you look, but you don’t find it. That is alone.
My arms bleeding from scratching on wood, I noticed a light coming closer to mine in the dark. My heart jumped. Maybe I wasn’t alone! A beaten and patched boat, what looked like a floating shack, pulled up and slowed next to my own struggling craft. I looked over with desperation. The sun told me it had been a whole night and part of a day since I left. The water had sucked the time.
“Do you have a leak?” asked a silky voice from the shadows of the other craft.
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “could you fix it?
“I can,” the person assured, “And better, I can give you something that will not only combat the voices but replace them with happiness and dryness and warmth. Would you like that?”
I struggled to remember my life before this boat, this hell. All that came through were murky memories of my father leaving in the rain, the kids in primary school laughing at my clothes, hiding from the mean kids in wet, damp places. A faint feeling came through, saying that I was remembering wrong, there had been so much more. I could not bring it to mind, and ceased to believe I had ever been happily dry before.
“Yes,” I was convinced. “What do you need?”
“Only a small fee for generous supply,”
I thought I heard a smirk.
It was only after the trade of half my money for a small jar of amber liquid that I thought I needed the funds for something. I saw an island, a girl being called out of class. Blinking, I saw only desolation and loneliness. I must have been dreaming. I pushed the image from my mind with thoughts of the comfort to come.
Immediately, I turned to the task of applying the solvent. Out of the jar, it burned my hands with a pain I thought I recognized as warmth. I spread it along the crack as it hardened and glowed with the heat of the forgotten and reimagined sun. Finally, I fell asleep in warm bliss and dreamt of dead eyes and old men.
I awoke with a start, wondering what was wrong. After a few minutes of trying to fall back into my beautiful visions, I realized that my fingers were wet and cold. Panicked, I reached for the jar and repeated the process from earlier. This time, I kept myself awake to experience the warmth and happiness in consciousness. When the sun had passed overhead and the warmth had started to fade, cracks started to open. I reached for the amber savior. This cycle was my whole existence for days. Or really, I guess, it took me days to come to scratch the bottom of the jar.
That night, I was again bailing out water with my bare hands and scratching my arms in my desperation.
Your mother is ashamed of you.
Your father left because of you.
You will never get to where you are supposed to be. Do you even remember where that is?
The voices had started grasping my past and using the worst, darkest, most tucked away pieces to bore into my head. I was leaning over the edge, about to fall in, when a new jar dropped into my home and a shack-like craft sped away.
Saved again, I fell into a pattern. A crack would open, and what had become my sole reason for existence was applied. I blissed out until the effects wore off, and put more on. Moments of worry would surface, when I thought each cycle was shorter or more water would seep in each time. I banished these with another dip into the jar. And another. Slowly, my surroundings changed from dark water and cloudy skies to clear water and blue skies. As hard as I tried, I could not get the cracks to stay shut, the boat to keep floating. Eventually, I dismissed the growing splendor around me as fake, dubbed the voices and the cold and the wet as real.
I lost track of time. It could have been days or weeks or months, but ultimately a jar ran out and the man of shadows did not come. I called and sobbed and scraped every last piece of broken glass, but the part of my soul that was still mine grew smaller. My whole body felt heavy, as if all it wanted was to sink. My breathing turned ragged and strained, fighting the fact that my chest just did not want to rise anymore. So much agony was inside me that my eyes hurt from the cruelness pushing against them. I would try to cry (it might relieve the pain), but crying takes energy and all I could do was sit still and just be. It was all I could do to just…stay. Freya, the girl in my dreams, the girl on the island, had been gone a long, long time.
There are pieces of this place in my life that I do not remember. Whether from cold or wet, sadness or loneliness, numbness or pain, some memories of this time just don’t exist. The last time, towards the end, I do remember. I paused my futile efforts to save myself and reached into the water. My fingers, at first, then my whole hand and forearm went warm and fuzzy. I felt sunshine on my back and could almost hear birds chirping in the wind. I leaned in until my face was inches from the water, teetering between the cold and the warm, and paused. Maybe I was scared of the depth of the water; maybe I felt there was something I needed to do. Maybe, for a split second, I had remembered my task. I pulled away and my head finally felt clear. The bombardment of water seemed to slow down, and I took stock of my surroundings. A bag lay forgotten under a seat, and I realized that my tattered clothes hung off my frame. The cans had fallen overboard at some point and the bread was wet and moldy, but I hadn’t even noticed. I told myself I was fine, but I was beginning to realize something bad had happened and I was just now coming out of it. A wallet was stashed inside the bag, empty. I realized I must have used my money. All of it. What would mom say?
Mom! I had finally remembered my mother! I didn’t even know where I was. For the first time, I looked at my environment with a pure eye, and found myself extremely close to a sunny beach. I looked at the circles in the sand underneath me (when had the water turned clear? When had it gotten so shallow?), and realized I must have been rowing in circles for a long time.
Broken jars littered my boat, and my arms stung from my wounds and the salt of the water. I remembered my time of amber liquid, dark nights, wet hands, and a heavy, numb mind. I remembered them as I stepped onto the beach. I remembered them as I worked for and brought medicine back to my mother to find her already recovering. I remember them as I ride the bus, as I watch movies, as I eat with friends. I remember them, but I do not let them control me. Sometimes, yes, I am by myself, but I am never, ever, truly alone.
Staying Afloat
I have always considered myself an independent person. I walk to the bus by myself, I make dinner by myself, and I watch movies at the little local drive-in by myself. But my mother told me to never go out into the water without another person, and so I never did. Our little island was one of many in a vast, lonely ocean. The water there was dark, thick. Malicious. If you got caught too deep or in a strong current, you and your body were gone forever. Not even remembered. So I stayed on the island, watching movies and eating at cafes with friends. But one fall, I had to go into the water. One fall, I had to break my mother’s rule.
“Freya? Please step out into the hall,” my teacher called from the front of class. The office assistant outside said something to me. The exact words she used are lost in my memory now, but I knew they meant something had happened. Something was wrong with Mom. I raced through town, barely registering the familiar sights of weary seamen at bars and worn down wives plodding to and from the local store. I skidded around the bend in our driveway, racing to the living room and my mother’s side. I grasped her hands in mine and asked what was wrong.
“It’s my heart again,” my mom wheezed, “Remember last time? I had to get that medicine from the other island. But then your father was here to go…” Her eyes pleaded with me.
I nodded, ignoring the stab of pain at the mention of Dad. “Where’s the emergency money?”
By the time I had packed all the money we had, moved my mom into her bed, and shoved some food and water into a bag, I had almost come to terms with the idea of going that far in the sea, alone. I was almost excited. I had always wanted to be by myself.
I jogged back through town and went right up to an old sailor who rented out boats. I told him I needed a small craft to go to the next island to the west. I could pay him now. His empty eyes rose painfully to meet mine.
“You don’t know what it does to you,” he whispered. I noticed his worn and scarred body for the first time.
“It gets your soul first. People say that only the weak ones fall in, but really it takes strength to resist at all. Please. Don’t go,”
Scared, I replied, “I have to. I will fight. I am not the type to succumb.”
Before I could lose hope, I pushed off in the first rowboat I saw. And then I was… alone.
I look back now at the events of that fall, and wish I had done so many things differently. Brought more supplies, asked for advice, taken a nicer craft, gotten someone to come with me, anything.
I headed away from safety, west towards the sun. Here, I stopped to take a look at the feared sea. The sky was grey and clear, but clouds were heading my direction from the horizon. I felt I could smell rain on the wind. The boat was wooden and rough, as any boat would be if a girl came and took it while distracted. The view was serene and pleasant, if only one could avoid looking at the water. Waves in this part of the world are rounded and slow, not the fabled versions of beaches they say exist elsewhere. The water was dark, black, and heavy, almost like corn syrup. They say it sucks your soul first, and then gets your body when you are too miserable to go on. I, at my young age, had thought the old men sitting by the sidewalks were telling stories. That their scars and bruises were from some other horror. Something so evil just could not be. Now, I was not so sure.
And then I saw the puddle. A seam had opened in the side of my boat, and water was trickling in. I cupped my hands to bail it out, and it was then that I believed the stories. As I put my hands over the side to get rid of the filthy water, a voice called faintly in my head. Come, it said, it was warm down here. Do you really want to stay where you are? I roughly pulled back, scratching my arms on the wood as I moved to the center of my boat. The voice had a good point. I was cold. Why would I want to go back to my island and live in fear of the water, just to try and nurse my mother back to health? This surprised me, for immediately I thought, but I love her! I looked warily at the water. It had tried, but I was not going to listen again.
Meanwhile, darkness had been quietly dripping in through the crack in the wood, soaking me, and my boat sat lower in the water than before. I steeled myself, and started bailing it out. The voice was gone at first. I thought I had defeated it and started to relax. This was my mistake. Rolls of horrible words etched my brain as I struggled to keep myself afloat.
Finally, I realized my mistake. I had always wanted to be by myself. I had never wanted to be alone. Feeling independent and feeling lonely are very different. Independence makes one feel whole. Like they don’t need another person to survive. It is invigorating, liberation. But loneliness is very different. Feeling alone is like feeling fractured. You feel broken, but broken in a way that nobody will help you. At this point, you need another person to survive and you need help. And you look, but you don’t find it. That is alone.
My arms bleeding from scratching on wood, I noticed a light coming closer to mine in the dark. My heart jumped. Maybe I wasn’t alone! A beaten and patched boat, what looked like a floating shack, pulled up and slowed next to my own struggling craft. I looked over with desperation. The sun told me it had been a whole night and part of a day since I left. The water had sucked the time.
“Do you have a leak?” asked a silky voice from the shadows of the other craft.
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “could you fix it?
“I can,” the person assured, “And better, I can give you something that will not only combat the voices but replace them with happiness and dryness and warmth. Would you like that?”
I struggled to remember my life before this boat, this hell. All that came through were murky memories of my father leaving in the rain, the kids in primary school laughing at my clothes, hiding from the mean kids in wet, damp places. A faint feeling came through, saying that I was remembering wrong, there had been so much more. I could not bring it to mind, and ceased to believe I had ever been happily dry before.
“Yes,” I was convinced. “What do you need?”
“Only a small fee for generous supply,”
I thought I heard a smirk.
It was only after the trade of half my money for a small jar of amber liquid that I thought I needed the funds for something. I saw an island, a girl being called out of class. Blinking, I saw only desolation and loneliness. I must have been dreaming. I pushed the image from my mind with thoughts of the comfort to come.
Immediately, I turned to the task of applying the solvent. Out of the jar, it burned my hands with a pain I thought I recognized as warmth. I spread it along the crack as it hardened and glowed with the heat of the forgotten and reimagined sun. Finally, I fell asleep in warm bliss and dreamt of dead eyes and old men.
I awoke with a start, wondering what was wrong. After a few minutes of trying to fall back into my beautiful visions, I realized that my fingers were wet and cold. Panicked, I reached for the jar and repeated the process from earlier. This time, I kept myself awake to experience the warmth and happiness in consciousness. When the sun had passed overhead and the warmth had started to fade, cracks started to open. I reached for the amber savior. This cycle was my whole existence for days. Or really, I guess, it took me days to come to scratch the bottom of the jar.
That night, I was again bailing out water with my bare hands and scratching my arms in my desperation.
Your mother is ashamed of you.
Your father left because of you.
You will never get to where you are supposed to be. Do you even remember where that is?
The voices had started grasping my past and using the worst, darkest, most tucked away pieces to bore into my head. I was leaning over the edge, about to fall in, when a new jar dropped into my home and a shack-like craft sped away.
Saved again, I fell into a pattern. A crack would open, and what had become my sole reason for existence was applied. I blissed out until the effects wore off, and put more on. Moments of worry would surface, when I thought each cycle was shorter or more water would seep in each time. I banished these with another dip into the jar. And another. Slowly, my surroundings changed from dark water and cloudy skies to clear water and blue skies. As hard as I tried, I could not get the cracks to stay shut, the boat to keep floating. Eventually, I dismissed the growing splendor around me as fake, dubbed the voices and the cold and the wet as real.
I lost track of time. It could have been days or weeks or months, but ultimately a jar ran out and the man of shadows did not come. I called and sobbed and scraped every last piece of broken glass, but the part of my soul that was still mine grew smaller. My whole body felt heavy, as if all it wanted was to sink. My breathing turned ragged and strained, fighting the fact that my chest just did not want to rise anymore. So much agony was inside me that my eyes hurt from the cruelness pushing against them. I would try to cry (it might relieve the pain), but crying takes energy and all I could do was sit still and just be. It was all I could do to just…stay. Freya, the girl in my dreams, the girl on the island, had been gone a long, long time.
There are pieces of this place in my life that I do not remember. Whether from cold or wet, sadness or loneliness, numbness or pain, some memories of this time just don’t exist. The last time, towards the end, I do remember. I paused my futile efforts to save myself and reached into the water. My fingers, at first, then my whole hand and forearm went warm and fuzzy. I felt sunshine on my back and could almost hear birds chirping in the wind. I leaned in until my face was inches from the water, teetering between the cold and the warm, and paused. Maybe I was scared of the depth of the water; maybe I felt there was something I needed to do. Maybe, for a split second, I had remembered my task. I pulled away and my head finally felt clear. The bombardment of water seemed to slow down, and I took stock of my surroundings. A bag lay forgotten under a seat, and I realized that my tattered clothes hung off my frame. The cans had fallen overboard at some point and the bread was wet and moldy, but I hadn’t even noticed. I told myself I was fine, but I was beginning to realize something bad had happened and I was just now coming out of it. A wallet was stashed inside the bag, empty. I realized I must have used my money. All of it. What would mom say?
Mom! I had finally remembered my mother! I didn’t even know where I was. For the first time, I looked at my environment with a pure eye, and found myself extremely close to a sunny beach. I looked at the circles in the sand underneath me (when had the water turned clear? When had it gotten so shallow?), and realized I must have been rowing in circles for a long time.
Broken jars littered my boat, and my arms stung from my wounds and the salt of the water. I remembered my time of amber liquid, dark nights, wet hands, and a heavy, numb mind. I remembered them as I stepped onto the beach. I remembered them as I worked for and brought medicine back to my mother to find her already recovering. I remember them as I ride the bus, as I watch movies, as I eat with friends. I remember them, but I do not let them control me. Sometimes, yes, I am by myself, but I am never, ever, truly alone.
Sometimes I feel like writing poetry and sometimes I watch Netflix. No judging.
