HIRAETH You’re ten and naive. You’re ten and naive, living in this little town in the countryside where it’s sunny all year round, and you’re always able to see crystal circles behind your eyelashes when you tilt your head to stare at the sky. Your home is up to the east, where the sun rises every morning at six o’clock. Rainbows would always catch in the glass planes of the home you live in hours after the sun has made itself apparent at the zenith of the sky, throwing all the colors you’ve ever dreamed of onto the wooden floorboards. You spend most of your time skipping school until it’s summer and you’ve learned nothing but the phases of the moon and the way in which fifteen times fifteen is two-hundred twenty five. But it’s fine, because the world isn’t supposed to make sense anyway. Because you’ve never really understood how the tomatoes in your family’s garden always ripen around this time, why it is that every time you step outside you stay rooted to the ground, or what makes the world spin round and round. You skip in all your strawberry glory, ice cream bar in hand as you swing your arms like a helicopter, not stopping until
19|The penchant||DEC 2021
you topple over. Soft, pink clouds paint the bright blue skies, yet you take no notice, as the world is already perfect and complete in your rose-tinted glasses. It blocks the sweat that threatens to fall into your eyes and the harsh sunlight that beats its people to a crisp. All you see is the friendly neighbor’s kid, coming in to check up on you, and the sparkling, fizzy river that cuts through your home territory. You watch the crickets chirp as they weave between the grass blades and listen to the hum of your grandma’s voice as she bakes you your favorite red velvet cookies. You pursue these crickets, chasing them until the sun has sunk past the horizon. In your mind, your dripping ice cream bar is far less important than this monkey chase. You bounce your way back home, riding on the blankets of the misty fog. The chirping cicadas trumpet your return as the sovereign of the land, silencing at the arrival of the empress. Your grandma takes you by the arm, sweeping you into the one-story house while you tell her of your grand adventures. You eagerly rip off your jacket, sticking your hair out the window as the breeze washes over you in your white tank-top. You wonder wistfully if this is how you will live the rest of your life: sleeping under the brilliant cotton clouds, skipping rocks against the pond to the west, watching as the seasons
by sophie mo and isabel lai
pass with practiced ease, the world leaving you with all that it has to offer. But, oh, how naive you were at ten. Time escapes your grasp like those lizards that scuttle away from your reaching hands, and you find yourself losing your youth to high standards and the pressure of being independent. It’s the incessant badgering of your family for you to get married, to get a job, to get a family, that makes you sacrifice yourself to the city, moving away from all the things that make you feel alive. Now you’re twenty nine, going on thirty, and you’ve lost the innocence of your childhood. The world suddenly makes too much sense to the point where you understand everything, and so you’ve come to learn that the laws which set this world in place do not have a place for you. You are an outcast, a blur between the lines of reality and the fantasy you left behind eleven years ago. And so. So, you’ve stopped wondering why the world kept turning even when it knew you were being left behind, stopped pondering about what you would do the next day, stopped thinking all together. Because everything now is a straight, rigid routine, devoid of the freedom you tasted on your tongue when you were ten. You now work at a lousy insurance company that keeps you awake from six in the morning to eleven in the nights
