Room of Water

This piece encapsulates the desolation and solitude that can arise in very simple and recurring moments, such as the coming of morning. These moments are sometimes hopeful and inspiring, and other times filled with despair. This disparity manifests in the way we treat the people around us, as well as how we treat ourselves. It shows in the way we choose to crawl back under the covers, instead of putting on a pair of jeans and going downstairs for breakfast. We’ve all experienced these debilitating emotions, and I have tried to put these emotions into words. I describe a typical morning in the life of a teenager, a morning without any tragic circumstance, but for some reason riddled with difficulty.

I open my eyes. It’s 8am, just in time to hear my mom knock on my bedroom door. She knocks every weekday just after 8 am to make sure I’m on time for school. It’s like clockwork. I always wake up a couple minutes before she knocks, hoping to soften the shock. In awaiting her arrival, I can enjoy a couple minutes of silence while the morning sun creeps in through my window blinds that sit half-open. I’ve convinced myself of the substance that these minutes hold, and so I hang onto them with dear life. But they hang onto me with a tighter grip. They lie close beside me. And they remind me of their brevity by ripping off my clothes and slamming the door. I watch them slip from my fingertips as the noise of my mother’s footsteps pollutes my silence. The footsteps stop, and I prepare myself for the unsettling, yet very familiar, noise of my mother’s knock. All at once, I let go of the silence. I let go of the silence, and the day begins. No matter how familiar this morning routine becomes, the way it disturbs my repose always comes as a surprise. I have put much thought into how something so familiar can be equally as shocking and disquieting. It’s the same way we become so familiarized with the feeling of heartbreak, and we understand the inevitability

By Téa Stewart