3rd Gabi Brown, “Minnows in the Shadows”

Minows in the Shallows

Zinny music leaks out of my cracked iphone, starting and restarting with each swipe of my right thumb. So goes the woes of tik tok. One more swipe and my brain decided it’d had enough, so that same thumb double clicked and suddenly I had been transported to a world of forehead pics and TMZ reports- and even though I told myself I didn’t care what Kim Kardahsian had worn when she was seen exiting her mega mansion, I found myself clicking through and learning with even more taps of that damn right thumb.

Eventually, the cycle repeated; TMZ couldn’t keep one occupied for too long. It was time for the stories. Through the cracked screen I saw Lucy and Claire laughing with each other, Rowan and Allie dancing, a random teenager I didn’t know I knew coughing out that monstrous cloud of vapour from a beaten up juul. And even though none of these excursions looked to be any sort of fun, there was a hole in my chest, and a voice in my head wondering why I wasn’t good enough to be invited.

My reverie is broken, the telltale dragging and squeaking sounds of the bedroom door stabbing through the fog as my roommate comes back in the room. Her head bent over at an unnatural angle, feet on autopilot propelling toward her bed- and her thumb, just mindlessly swiping. At this point, the logical thing would obviously be to turn off my phone, but I must be a glutton for punishment, because I was double clicking, swiping and doing all these gen z gymnastics on over to TikTok again, where the tinny music started up.

Sitting there, I felt suffocated, not the kind that happens when a grape lodges itself in your throat or an ocean wave takes you by surprise. Suffocation, the type where your hands wring themselves until it feels as if they are bruised, cuticles hurt with the picking of hangnails, heart beats out an irregular pattern and lungs aren’t being deprived of any oxygen yet can’t take that required inhale. The possibilities of what my life could, should, be according to everything I saw on the internet weighed heavily on me. The videos were like the little minnows I’d try to catch with my older brother in the summers between our elementary school years. Sometimes we were able to snag one or two, just to have to put them back a little while later. All those little

minnows seemed so easy to reach out and grab, but as soon as I moved a muscle they would disappear into the murky water and out of my life.

Like the minnows- Tiktoks, Snapchats and TMZ stories would swim around myconsciousness darting out of reach as soon as I reached out. They left me drowning amongst my ikea covers desperately trying to grasp how my life could become as interesting as everyone else’s seemed. The possibilities were all there, so many of them stifling me until the best option appeared to be sinking under the ikea covers.

With so many paths becoming more and more readily available to us, why are we becoming less and less inclined to take any of them? When a fork in the road appears, and a clear left and right is presented, all there is to do is consider the two options and continue down the best one. With all the information constantly being offloaded onto our brains, the fork becomes more of an interlacing of spindly veins running up, down and all over, with more paths than one can even count. Instead of traipsing down a few for a quick peek, all curiosity is lost and we turn tail to head back the way we’ve come, staying as a stationary object with no chance of growth.

Gabi Brown—3rd Place, 9/10 Non-Fiction

Emily Liang—Grade 10