This week’s Young Writers Project piece by Zach Ward, a senior at
Northfield High School, is an elliptical look at the frenzy we often feel about
trying to see, feel, experience as many things as we can all at once.
For more great student writing go to youngwritersproject.org
Part of me feels foolish – like that was ever even possible. But most of me
knows no regret, just circles–winding wildygrowingspinesandteethwithTIME. It’s
a shifting of gears, a stopping and stuttering and grinding (again to life) that’s
only audible when you slow your blood at night to devour, in earnest, that
ancient machinery resting, silently, above us. The semblance of motionless
matter that binds us, reminds us to look up when we haven’t got anything better
to do anyways.
I feel like there are continents asleep on your
nightstand. I feel like there are so many roads left for us. I find myself
salivating. I find myself following your hoarse laughter through time, changing
slowly, shifting and churning like a pair of runaway stars – nestled in
not-knowing, orbiting one another. And I guess I’ve been holding on to this,
like one of the many-colored pens inside my back pocket that I fumble for when
life begins to roar, like television static, and I don’t have the heart to dial
it back in again.