About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Fiona Goodman, 12, lives and runs in Brattleboro. She writes about slowing down, running at her own pace and noticing the world around her.
Three minutes
By Fiona Goodman
[A]t first we ran together, she and I,
she just beginning to breathe hard and I
trying to pretend that I wasn’t
about to fall over in exhaustion
and pass out upon the path.
I stretched my legs to keep her pace,
not wanting to be alone with only me to motivate myself
but I couldn’t keep up.
It could be that she,
being superior,
raced ahead of me on the path,
picked up her speed because she knew what to do,
because she wasn’t as weak,
because she was better,
or it could be that I
suddenly knew what I needed
(and it wasn’t
to push myself past the breaking point
simply because I wanted to run the race with her)
and how to get that,
so I chose my own pace
and slowed to it,
and stayed that way.
Alone, yes,
but by my own choosing.
Doing what I needed to do
for me, not for her.
And she
finished the race before me
(of course)
and I came in 68 out of 100
but that isn’t the point.
She didn’t see the scenery
or wonder what that absurd man was doing in the undergrowth across the road
or wonder if maybe a story could begin this way.
And we don’t
find happiness in life because we run as fast as we can toward it.
So does it matter
whether I couldn’t keep her pace
or she didn’t want to keep mine?
She finished.
I finished.
Three minutes apart.
