The Scrawl MT23: Metamorphosis

THE SCRAWL MT23:

Metamorphosis

By Ruby

THE SCRAWL BALLIOL COLLEGE Issue 3, MT23: METAMORPHOSIS

Edited by: Lucy Jones & Angèle Baum Comrade Shakespeares 2023

Welcome to the MT23 issue of Balliol’s Scrawl!

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted their amazing work – we’ve really enjoyed getting to know you at our events and seeing your wide range of creativity.

We wish the best of luck to Rosie and Imogen in the coming terms – we look forward to seeing what they do with the Scrawl.

But for now, have a great vacation everyone!

Your Comrade Shakespeares, Lucy and Angèle xx

Anonymous

What I think of when I think of metamorphosis I think of the changing of the city Of sickened stone under a soggy grey sky Yellow like dead skin Of lukewarm rain, stained with car fumes Pooling in your shoes Of the faceless masses in muted colour The lapsing, shallow breath of the city And yet how when darkness Drapes the firmament in velvet blue The city comes to life again The rain’s sparkling chill on your skin Cars humming musically The face of a stranger, throbbing with colour The deep breath of life, a million lives I think of the changing of the season Of the last dregs of summer heat In long and sweaty afternoons Of fields of sun-stained brown waving To the scratching calls of crickets Of the stately grandeur of a solitary cloud Against a dome of flawless blue And yet how when the cold wind Brings with it the misty breath of autumn In evenings pooling into starry darkness And the rain glitters in meadows of silky green grass To the billowing call of a wandering bird The clouds a vortex of silvery grey Its eye a bright diamond of blue I think of the changing of the person Who packs up to search for some new part of themselves And leave the old flaws behind Who replots their goals and rewrites their daydreams In the glimmer of a fresh new perspective Who finds new friends, new loves, new minds Always growing older and wiser And yet how when you go home again You find the pieces within you are still the same Just maybe in a different order Those dreams which are reused and recycled Into new forms, but familiar ones The same people at the bar, and down the street The same places, the same memories

- Ralph Whitworth

By Theo

Autumn Walks

By Lucy Jones

Opening to a short story

If asked to choose the hardest part of adolescence, I wonder what most people would say. I suppose it would be different for everyone. I imagine there’d be a fair few people who’d cite the particularly cruel physical side effects of puberty. Perhaps for others it would be the heightened pressure and self-consciousness. A popular candidate would undoubtedly be the atrocity that is starting to experience desire and its pervasive counterpart rejection. Personally, as difficult as my thirteen-year-old self found my chronic acne - which earned me a year of bullying and an aversion to anything smelling remotely like Benzoyl Peroxide Gel - for me, adolescence ironically reached its lowest point when I was at the tail end of it, ready to leave behind those years of insecurity, voice-breaks and failed attempts at navigating desire and dating. I talk of adolescence as if maturity helped me fix the predicament brought by my eighteenth year, when in reality I know this not to be the case. With hindsight, the only things I can imagine easing my predicament involve either becoming someone else entirely, or kickstarting a midlife crisis and buying a very expensive and impressive car to distract from more or less everything about my personality. However, I’d only ever had one job, which was plant-watering for my neighbours when they went on holiday, and I didn’t even get paid. It turns out I’d confused the real plants with the plastic ones (which had struck me as suspiciously unabsorbent) and so actually found myself with - £47.50 (now being in debt to my mum for the money she had been loaning me since deciding our neighbours needed reimbursing for the costs of all the plants I killed).

Metamorphosis it would have to be, then, unless anyone had happened to be looking for an 18 year old intern whose CV could only boast a proficiency for killing three separate breeds of plant in a very short space of time.

- Anonymous

Tree of All Seasons

By Angèle Baum

One with Nature

By Lucy Jones

Anonymous

hey stranger hey stranger, now isn't that strange? how we go from strangers to friends to lovers then strangers again seasons may change but people don't and God knows I know people come and go and you might just let it pass with the winter but for me, forgiving and forgetting will never get easier at times I wonder whether you just wanted to see these watercolor eyes cry but I guess I'll never get an answer after your irish goodbye you caught me like a deer in headlights, now I wish you kept on driving because it hurts to know I lost everything and you're out here thriving I gave you more pieces of me than the desert has sand and holding this grudge has left marks on my hands You couldn't have cared less about someone who loved you more And after all the pain you've caused me I wished i'd known before maybe all I need is for you to pick up the phone and give me a reason but deep down I know you would never change, no matter the season sometimes I wish you would just call me up and say "hey stranger, I really hope you're okay" but my heart is made of glass and it just might break now I would be lying if I said that I forgot about you but if you said the same, it just might be the truth loving you was like gravity and I couldn't help but fall but hey stranger, maybe I didn't know you at all -

Francisco

Imprints of Leaves

By Angèle Baum