Sinking Stress
by Alexandra Vyvyan
I am 16 years old and I do creative writing for fun, I have had small pieces of writing published and enter competitions irregularly, I write more poetry than anything else and enjoy losing myself in writing.
A teenage girl feels trapped and drowning in the mass of useless information forced upon her.
I wondered if anyone else noticed how pretty the sky was today, how the darkness was bright and soft all at once. I blinked transforming the green leaves from the oak into molten bands of blue turning to purple and pink. Gravity pulled me, flailing, through the murky liquid seeping rapidly into my veins. I tried to order my thoughts. To keep calm I began naming the colours. I wished I could change them.
I have often looked back on my life so far to see what I would change if I could. I’m not proud to say that each time I do this there seems to be more that I wish was different and yet still, I do nothing about it. I never talked to the quiet girl in the class until she moved away, and I never spent time with my family when I had the chance.
Subconsciously, I had dragged each colour into ordered rows in the sky. Starting with red. There is red in everything I do. To me, red represents fire and sensitivity, passion, and rage. Green reminds me of jealousy and ambition. Next came blue. Blue is loyalty. One of the most important things in life. All these colours, very different but all tinted with the same thing. Grey. Grey is emotionless, dull, timeless. Grey is all that I see some days. Some days I slump at the back of the class praying I won’t be called on. Some days when I wake up and everything seems pointless. Some days the grey blinds me, drowns me, grasps at me while I tried to run with sticky feet; in this case, the grey water covered my eyes and ran through me as I gasped for the chance to see the sky one last time. It was the same sky that was full of fire all day, the orange of every wintry hearth keeping me going, but now that I was at home staring at this textbook, I was drowning in the realization of reality. I stared up at the starless, moonless abyss searching for answers. That summer-fruit backdrop had changed to hues of blue, purple and then almost magenta, colours merging as if they were juice-mix dissolving in a glass of water or ink running off a page. I wished I could change it. The words stretching across this coloured canvas create a soul-blackening applique to the explosion of stress behind it. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to the colours of everyday objects unless it was clothes, shoes, or stationery but this was a welcome distraction—anything was, even if it was just the colours outside my bedroom window.
I wanted to open the window and escape out onto the broad branches of the oak outside. But I couldn’t. This is just something that my generation has been destined for, from the day we were born, but with nothing we can do about it. A privilege or a curse, both a debate that we can’t join in on. I wish I could change it.
My mind has been crammed with so much useless information, like the powerhouse of a cell or the quadratic formula. So many useless things that I will never use but will define me for the rest of my life. I am a number plotted on a graph, an item on a shelf waiting to be picked by someone wanting my work. That same someone will be able to decide the quality of my life providing I lived up to my numbers, or the label I will be given on results day.
The grey water is back, rising so quickly, choking me and swirling me up in this whirlpool of knowledge. I can see nothing clearly; numbers, equations, quotes, dates, points in time, people, opinions and everything else imaginable to a teenage girl like myself. The whirlpool was draining. I was too, but I had no way of changing it.