INEWORD P

Monday May 1, 2023 | Pinewood International American School of Thessaloniki

Creative Writing Corner—Poetry

nonymous | Contributing Writer A

I don't know what to do

With this aching pain in my chest

It consumes me

Like the ocean consumes ships

And the earth water

I miss our happy little moments

The ones that built our relationship

I miss the way you looked at me

The way you smiled

The way your eyes shined

Like the brightest blue stars in the galaxy

I miss the way things used to be

And the pain keeps spreading

As every day all I have left

Are our memories

Distant, cold, painful memories

That once used to be

My favorite moments in life

I hate the way you changed

And the way you hurt me

I hate how you acted all cold

And forgot me

I wish you would have stopped

And thought for a second

I loved you more than life itself

More than the flowers love the rain

And the moon loves the sun

I loved you more than poetry can explain

More than the starry nights sustain

I loved you with my whole being

And now all that's left

Is a lifeless soul

Filled with pain

In the body of someone I once used to be

The Mirror

I stood in front of the mirror in the center of my room confidently. After all, my dress was as bright and pure as the smile of a child: it could not lie. And my hair, a very fine fusion of blonde and brown, was still warm from the heat of the straightener. My face still felt the freshness of the clean water and soap, and the texture of the light lip gloss on my lips. The light brown jacket thrown loosely over my shoulders and the sea blue shoes on my feet topped it all off. It was an outfit close to perfection, and looking at myself in the mirror dressed like that, I couldn’t help the borderline narcissistic thoughts that invaded my head from that one moment of glamor, even though my personality was usually the complete opposite.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” my outfitted-self spoke.

I wanted to hear, “You. You are the fairest of them all, Hope.” I wanted someone, anyone to see the Hope that fell asleep on top of her textbooks and piles of paper and poured her heart into the short stories she loved to write. For me, it was the only Hope I ever saw, the only Hope I wanted to see.

“It is your classmate, who never closes a book without finishing it first, and your best friend, who spends hours in the lab, her eye under a microscope instead of reflecting the blue light coming from the screen,” responded the Mirror to my dismay.

“But… I drool over my textbooks… and my hand goes numb from all my writing… My eyes close on top of pages that smell fresh of pen ink almost every night!” I said, as nothing but the sound of my jacket is heard in the room, almost as if it's echoing. Weird, though, because it’s the first time something’s ever echoed in this room.

“But that's not enough is it? Not if you want to be the fairest, surely,” the Mirror responded, completely disregarding my answer as if it were normal for her to hear such a response. Too normal.

“What is being ‘the fairest’?” I asked, hands covering my face.

The second echo I had ever heard in my room was the sound of my knees falling. The third echo would come just a moment later and it was my voice as the floor became shiny from the waterfall flowing from the long eyelashes. Tracing my cheeks. And splashing onto the floor.

“Answer me!” I managed to yell out.

This would be the fourth echo before I floated in the pond the earlier waterfall had created.