Who am I?
Who am I
but a delicate porcelain vase
that someone lets slip from their
hands
to break into fragments that hide
in the darkness?
Who am I
a new-born fawn that has no strength
to pick itself up?
Who am I
but simply a bird who can no longer soar into
the skies to the destinations it has
dreamed of?
Who am I
but simply a forgotten love
replaced?
Who am I
similar to a secret known to cause shame
and cowardliness?
Who am I?
Who am I…
While pots and pans were clattering in the sink by the pressure of the water that was spewing out forcefully, Ralph smirked. For a 46-year-old who was just left by his wife last week, he was carrying on with his life just fine without her.
“That bitch,” he muttered, tugging on the sprinkle of hairs around his cherry of a belly button. Hmm, I should probably take it a little easier on the beer, though.
With one hand, he set down his Ronzoni tri-colored penne that was honestly a little too al dente for anyone’s taste – Ralph shrugged when he tried it – and pan-fried chicken on his beloved coffee table that he purchased twenty years ago at Bob’s Discount Furniture, while his other hand was occupied with far more pressing matters. There were no tissues in sight, so he selected Option 2 by jamming his finger up his nose. Plopping his rotund self onto the couch, he saw ESPN was already on the television, waiting for him.
“Hey, thanks,” Ralph said running one of his meaty paws, including that same unfortunately just-occupied finger, through his shockingly red tuft of a receding hairline.
“Don’t mention it.”
“How’ve you been? We haven’t talked in a while…”
Silence.
“C’mon, answer me! I miss having you to talk to. You understand me. Not many people do, you know.”
“I know. But you and I also know that us talking is wrong, Ralph. We both know this. Doctor Schroeder told us we gotta quit talking like this.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Ralph pouted. “You and I have a great connection.”
He looked up at the television, which was getting a bit staticky. Bad connection. He sighed heavily as he rose off the couch the way a helicopter does from a helipad – rather grotesquely but all the while with an element of grace.
“Prepare for lift-off!”
“Hey, we promised Doctor Schroeder you’d talk nicer to me.”
“Or did we promise we’d stop talking in general?”
“Stop that!”
“Stop that!”
“Don’t mock me, I mean it.”
“How are the pills, Ralph? I wasn’t aware you didn’t want me around anymore.”
“I haven’t taken them in a week! C’mon, you know that. That’s how you’re here right now!”
“Are you lonely, Ralph? Why do you only talk to me when you feel lonely?”
“Don’t do this to me. You just kept saying how we ought to stop, and now you’re acting so needy… Wait! WAIT! I’m so sorry, wait, stop! Don’t go!”
Ralph rubbed his temples. He was alone now. From his throne in the living room, he had an unobstructed view of his bedroom. He angrily eyed the bottle of untouched pills that stood stoically upon his nightstand. He’d be damned if he ever took those again. Quite quickly, his original sense of sadness disappeared as a small smile manifested itself on his sweaty face. He knew they’d talk again soon.
Shimmering reverie,
Where the statuesque mountains tower over uncharted streams as alert as you did
Those vivacious, pulsating nights as the stars did shine
Though not as bright as your wildfire eyes
And though not as bright as your electrical mind
Nothing can compare to the impulses of within
The internal itches that make one roused with a perverse delight,
Nor the external urges that make one tremble with anticipation of the indefinite, the unguaranteed
One time you instructed me to follow your lead
I agreed, dutifully, loyally, stepping along
My bare feet made ever-lasting prints upon the marshy rapture
My steps were to the pace of my own rhythm
But the sweet, sweet melody in the background,
Well, that was all yours.
You showed me, with a grand, sweeping gesticulation of your right arm
All that the world is composed of,
From the arcane way that blades of grass can be split down their centers
And create two out of what previously was only one
To the way moss grows upon pavement built of brick,
Creeping into crevices and finding itself a new home in the spaces I had never known to previously exist.
I suppose, in theory, you hadn’t provided me with too much
But yet, you thrust upon me a landscape, un-gated
A world of boundless expansion of the mind,
Reaching further and further into my nebular abyss
All you ever did was introduce me to life
But without such an overture as enchanting as yours,
I would have never known how simply sweet the melody is:
(The melody that we stepped to on that dazzling, radiant evening)
The Anthem of the Living.
I promised not to intrude, not to pull you apart thread by thread, only to restitch you into something you aren’t, someone more beautiful and poetic than you are, but I’m breaking that promise, Dear Friend, breaking one thing to fortify another, and I am sorry, because I hate to rift our friendship, but I need to do this. You will forgive me, I am sure of it, and if you don’t, that is your character in question. P
Through cascades of colored ribbon that are our voices, mine a solid forest green, yours, a vivid purple, I found you intriguing, a person of interest, someone I wished to know. My aspirations of friendship were eased through common threads in the textiles that we are made of; a favorite author, a fondness for music, and corresponding views on society made me comfortable with the concept of you.
Although I realize you may not see me as much, just a childish plaything there for your amusement, to talk to and soon forget about, I will have you know that I disregard your pretension, I am blind to every negative thing about you. This is not denial, it is the way I choose to live my life, and I hope that you might see this through your oblivion to the positive.
Hearing you hum out the emotions of you, plucking away six-stringed anxieties, I find myself thinking. You may say that I am always thinking, but in all honesty, I am really only over-thinking, which is so different from the trim, organized thoughts I think when a tune of yours is there to sift them out for me. I can’t remember serenity, what it feels like, but music takes my cluttered mind as close to it as possible, and yours is not the exception. Keep it coming, I long to hear your solemn expressions.
You, in one word, are an outlier, perpetually engaged in silent mental warfare with your own person, yet trying to contend with the frustrations and simple agitation of the world. There is no need to find yourself, only express it. I think you do a marvelous job, slipping snarky comments between utterances of pure comprehension, throwing us all off just enough to continue on with your independent cognition. I see what you are doing, and although I find it harder to communicate day by day, and my internal brilliance is held captive in a shell of naïve gaiety, I know the strategies of cerebral combat you are using, for I practically created them.
I realize you’d rather be left alone, rather recluse to the depth of your logic and never be human, but you don’t, and I am so thankful for that, because although at times I find you to be a conundrum, like the infinitely unsolved Rubik’s Cube sitting on my desk. I will always be here, me and my empty compliments, my empty compliments and I, we’ll wait for you. Until the day comes that you find yourself in need of justification, I will wait.
I realize now that I haven’t broken the aforementioned promise, that is, that I wouldn’t write you as something you aren’t. I haven’t broken it because everything I’ve written here is valid and honest, no author’s license needed, just a few metaphors. This epiphany does not counteract my firm stance that you will never read this, that is a promise that will remain standing, you will never read this, and I am sorry. I look forward to the day you wear those impeccable flaws on your sleeve, the day you show everyone and me past the tip of the iceberg, the day I know will come, because your webs of pretension and modesty cannot shield me from the depth of you.
@landlocks– Instagram
she rents out a room in an upper chamber of my heart,
paying by the month until she grows bored of such
a dusty, overpriced place to stay and
what a hurricane that girl is, leaving a bitter
taste in my mouth until i can’t feel the words I speak
but maybe I’m better off not drawn to her
barbed escapades, not returning to my parents
in a matchbox accompanied by
staged sound effects of slamming doors
that made my bones shake
and no friend to apply makeup to my corpse:
i got the best that i could have gotten,
a mere aftertaste that taints the taste
of unplanned joy
she loses herself in her own living room sometimes
i mean now that she’s found a home that suits her
she called me for the first time
in six months and i couldn’t hang up
not when she’s cried and naked the speakers shake:
“I have no love to I’ve and it’s left me to lose”
choking in her apologies and
leaving them to invade her respiratory system,
becoming a part of her she can’t fully breathe out
until the day she sighs for the last time
@reillzz — Instagram
Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in war
– Do not mention the son, war, death or the old man
Tall and dark, drawn with heavy hands and thick lines. It seemed like the creator had too many late nights, too many mistakes, too many eraser marks that somehow got carved into the structure.
It wasn’t like the buildings that lined the streets surrounding it, there was no alabaster finishes or silver lined doors. It was just dark, and not in the sense that you hope for dark things to be. Out of place, almost.
The building and the ground surrounding it both were the color of volcanic ash. Cigarette butts littered the pavement, but no smokers. Bird shit everywhere, but no birds, no trees.
Describe the exact same building by a lover.
– Do not mention love, the lover, or the person there
The building was sterile, but in the same way that the labor wing of a hospital was. Clean, dark, but promising. You could look at it and consider all the flowers delivered to it, the hiring hand shakes given between its marble walls. It didn’t need a silver lining to be entrancing. The exact roof of the building was covered in greenery, dripping off the edges and down into the top floor windows, standing like hair when you first come back to school. The vegetation could only be seen by whoever got close enough the edge of the structure.
11:46 PM – Bela Sanchez
@be.la (instagram)
all i went in to do was turn off the light, but then i saw them. all those pieces of me that you’ve been taking away, so small that i don’t notice each one until i see the gaping hole in my chest. i’m no brick wall, but you still have the uncanny ability to break me down. i don’t know what i’m writing, but i have to write something, anything, to fill this void, because tea and breathing exercises aren’t working. i’m sorry i get so stuck-stuck-stuck on words but i’ve heard if you say something enough it stops having any meaning. no matter how many times i write “i-miss-you”, it still sounds desperate. every rule has its exception. i’ve grown too accustomed to saying “i’m just tired”, when what i mean is “i am sad and i don’t know why.” but i haven’t slept in nine days and i’m living off coffee-induced dreams and trying to grasp some shred of exhaustion, so i think it’s a fair excuse. i can’t seem to remember how it feels to be so passionate about something that you fall unquestioningly into it each night. we’re driving so fast and i’m begging you to go faster because i want to know how the stars sound at the speed of light. i want to know how much it would burn if i got too close to the sun because I’m not suicidal but i might be staricidal. i can’t wrap my head around the edges of this universe and i can’t wrap my head around you. i wonder what the stars look like when they’re falling asleep.
Being in a different timezone in Rome, I realized my appreciation for technology. There’s only so much emotion and connection that can be exchanged through series of 140 character messages, but it feels infinite when you’re thousands of miles away.
I would wake up and realize that my friends were asleep, unknowingly being thought of in the Old World. My replies to emails probably seemed comical to the recipients because it appeared as though I had sent a non-urgent email in the wee hours of the morning.
I’m always stuck in the wrong timezone, like somewhere, somebody is waking up in Boston and I’m falling asleep in Rome, and they are going to be the catalyst for something in my life if our worlds could just cross.
I don’t understand why I haven’t found them yet, or if I should even keep searching desperately for some fateful coincidence to walk into my life.
It made me realize that fate won’t always match up, and you’re never going to completely feel like the people around you are on the same page. You’re going to feel that someday, no matter how far off, somebody is going to walk into your life and you’re going to understand the time deficits between people. And that’s not meant to be some hopelessly romantic statement because that’s not how it’s supposed to work. It seems to be that for most people, the forces that change them are random, unexpected, unprecedented.
I’m reeling at the idea of missing things, both literally and physically. I’ve checked my pockets tri hourly for the last two weeks in search of my phone, hoping to avoid pickpockets. I feel as though I miss something every time I leave home, like everybody I love is together and conspiring against me in my city when in reality they’re doing the exact same things that they would do if I were there. I feel like I’ve blinked and people have moved on and morphed into strangers really fast. I feel as though I am still a fifth grader, scared of talking to a boy I like; and sometimes an adult, drinking black coffee and worrying about a mortgage. I think I’m missing it because I can’t find where I’m supposed to be. I’m terrified that I’m not going to be able to keep up with the ever-changing expectations and rules that come together to govern the choices of young adults. I feel like I’m fitting my stereotype in every way, and not at all at the same time.
It’s the age old teenage story: feeling happy and sad, lost and found, infinite and already dried up, scared and fearless. I’m old enough to choose the right fork at dinner, but young enough to not know how to use it. It seems to fit the high school student cliché just as much as comparing yourself to Holden Caulfield, but the stereotype of the “lost teenager” had to come from some truth.
Somebody told me a few weeks ago that I “would blow them all to the wall when they realized that I was going places”. What does that even mean? Is that measured the amount of small talk I can make? Is it the facts I know? Is it the number of people who have told me they loved me, and meant it?
It makes me return to my obsession with the idea of “missing things:” What do I not understand about what that man said to me? What am I missing?
After a few hours of thinking, I tried to rest on the idea that the comment was made as a compliment. And as the sun began to set in Rome, I felt for a second like I wasn’t missing anything.
My favorite part of the day is the short moment when the majority of the world is awake, time zones cross over somehow and the world is alive. It makes me think that the people of the world are here, awake and thinking, waiting for me to find them.
Hi!
I’m Reilly Wieland, a teenager and high school student based in Austin, Texas. I’m so excited that you are visiting Inkling!
For all who don’t know what Inkling is, it’s a teenage and young adult based writing platform. As a creative writer, I found it hard to get my writing out into the public eye and to other writers. With that, young writers are always struggling for ways to expand their resume. I found it really hard to find websites that would take my writing because I had little experience. You can’t get experience because nobody wants you to write with such little experience. See the problem?
I’m pulling together this community because all of my writing friends have been so important to me. I love having other people online to write and share with, and I want to spread my love of it to teenagers everywhere.
It’s super easy writing for Inkling- with no commitments throughout the first few posts (or until you chose to become a staff writer) If you want to write for Inklings or want more information, feel free to email me at reilly@inklingwriting.co
Happy Writing,
Reilly
reilly@inklingwriting.co
Inkling 