Runner up - Senior section
The Friends School
Everyone wishes they had a purpose. Some people have already found theirs, thriving in the feeling that their life now has a mission that it otherwise did not possess before. Others have not, living in either perpetual confusion, their minds reeling and spinning, and spinning, and spinning; or in an elevated place of freedom and wistfulness, gliding through life without the burden of living up to a predetermined purpose.
I used to think the purpose of my life was to be a storyteller, a creator and discoverer of stories. A person who was forever poised over the threshold between fiction and reality, a line that becomes infinitely more blurred the longer one lingers in the doorway between the two worlds.
I was a person who could grasp the wispiest endings of a full-stop before it flew away from this world forever. I would reel it back in, towards my soul, where it would nest and burrow deeper into my bones, into my cells, and marrow. It would steep inside of me and bleed life through me, soaking itself in my own liquid life, the red stain imprinting my soul onto the wisp. It would swim through me until the wisp itself would bloom, a sapling would grow and grow, and the gnarled branches of an old oak tree would sprout throughout my body, the limbs entwining with my nervous system, reaching to the tips of my fingers, down the foundations of my legs, and through to my ears, finally whispering its story to me.
The matured wisp would whisper and sing its story to me, and I would share it with whoever was around to listen. The branches would take over my arms, my tendons, and my fingers, and tap their tips on lettered keys, typing out the whispered story for me to read. The story would slowly seep from my body, from my bones, and cells, and marrow. The beginning, the middle, the end, would retract from my nerves and flow down to the tips of my fingers, such a strong concentration that the blocked flow of story would result in a loss so catastrophic I don’t know how the world would cope. The story would write itself and when it was finished, the last wisp of the full-stop I originally grasped would be unfurled from my heart and breathed onto the page. My purpose was to house the stories until they were strong enough to take care of themselves, to take shape and flow from my body and out into the world once more, but this time enshrined in paper pages, and digital banks, never lost, preserved forever so people can experience their adventures.
Now I’m not too sure what the purpose of my life is. Where stories used to grow is an empty hollow, my nerves are left unprotected, lacking the hardy bark of oak trees around them. They are unshielded from the emotions that forever haunt my brain. My brain. God, my brain. It sits atop its skeletal throne, glaring out through my eye sockets at the world around me and it never stops. It never shuts up. Ever. It screams, and screams, and screams, and screams, and it doesn’t ever stop. It orders, and orders, and orders, never ceasing its demands. The blaring yell of my memories, my greatest fears, my deepest regrets, mixes and swirls with the softest echo of my happiest days, my treasured moments, and the tunes of songs that sing themselves silly around my head. The noise is unbearable, and underneath it all, matched to the erratic thumping of my heart, the hoarse wailing of a child too long ignored: MAKE IT STOP! And faster: MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP! And faster still: MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP!
My purpose in life, for so long, has been to get through each single day and to end it standing upright. To end my days standing unassisted on my own two feet. After a day of assisting, mine ends with no help, with no hands clutching the dead-weight of my vessel, keeping it up off the ground, keeping it from truly falling, down into the depths where I will never resurface. My days are filled with the need to help, to save, but I don’t help or save myself, no, because that isn’t possible for one screaming brain, a story-less hollow, and a lost child, to fix. I am cracked in ways that gold cannot even fix, the glorious China of my old self almost pulverised by the trials of life, and still people continue to pour molten gold over the seams, trying to weld my skin back together again, perhaps even in a way that might resemble something human-shaped.
I do not want to die, what I want more than anything is to truly, truly, live.
My purpose in life is undiscovered, and I don’t know where that will take me. Perhaps I will one day become reunited with the stories that once filled my soul, but until that happens, I live listlessly, chasing, devouring, the stories that others have housed and pinned down through pen onto paper. I ingest these stories into my heart, and they swim around, pressing and pressing with each beating thump, against my rib cage, they fill up the hollow where trees don’t grow, but there’s always a stabbing ache where they just can’t quite fill the void.
“What will my life look like in 10 years?”
Oh, my dear, I’m still trying to figure out what it will look like tomorrow, because I am hanging on by a singular thread and when that snaps, I’ll have not even the wispiest tail of a story’s end to stop me from falling.
