[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
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Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
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, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Ella Staats, 17, of Burlington says that this poem, “Queen of Denial,” “reflects on the passage of time and the passive view we sometimes take of our own lives.”
Queen of Denial
By Ella Staats
[I] blink myself into consciousness most mornings.
It’s slow to the point that I don’t know it’s happening until its effects are irreversible,
like when you start writing on unlined paper
and don’t notice that your words are slanting
until it’s too late.
And then I’m awake,
in the loosest sense of the word,
and my alarm is a jumble in my ears,
and my body is heavier than it’s ever been,
and I play the game where I weigh the pros and cons
of rising to face the world
versus hitting snooze and rolling over like it revolves around me.
I’ve never hit the snooze button.
It doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t still think I’m the sun.
I know that I’m supposed to get all bent out of shape
when someone announces that I’ve never actually seen what I look like
(pictures and reflections don’t count)
but the thought doesn’t scare me the way it’s supposed to.
Maybe I’m just not thinking hard enough about it,
or maybe my face in the mirror is enough affirmation
that I am who I think I am.
I trust the mirror in the upstairs bathroom to tell me the truth
(not the downstairs – the lighting is too forgiving.)
It doesn’t ask for my opinion –
it does its job and I don’t punish it for that,
even when I don’t like what it shows me.
How am I supposed to know when I am nearing the end?
Time moves in such deceptive ways –
bending and stretching and retreating into itself –
that a simple linear analysis can’t accurately judge
whether the close is near or far.
I feel it when I walk to class and the sound of my feet on the tiles gives me deja vu,
and I feel it when the smell of the city bus makes me want to both cry and laugh
at the thought of leaving it behind.
I feel a feverish need to reach the end of this section of string,
and yet that doesn’t alter the mechanics of the clockwork.
Maybe it’s odd that I desire to rush through parts of my life,
when living – or at least the illusion of it – is so precious.
Every day the wick burns a little further
and all I can do is watch the wax drip down
and hope I don’t get burned.
It doesn’t bother me to think
that I am under the influence of an easily manipulated mind.
Then again, maybe that’s the manipulation speaking.
Or maybe it’s just easier
being the Queen of Denial.
