top of page

1st Place in Writing, 2024 Annual Contest: "In 57 or A Thousand" - harmony patterson

I thought that maybe if I sat down and wrote you a letter, things would change. But they didn’t. So I’m sitting at my desk, looking at 57 pages of lined notebook paper, still feeling as angry and as sad and as happy and as regretful as I did when I was still staring at the blank pages. I’m starting to hate writing. And I can’t blame you for that. I should be able to blame you, but you aren’t the pen that I’m writing with. And you’re not the paper I write on. And you’re not the words that I write. As much as I’d like to hate you, I can’t. Because you aren’t the problem. The problem is why I’m writing. No matter how many pages I write or how many different pens or pencils I use or textures of paper, you will never fit on those 57 pages, and you will never fit on 58 or 59 or 60 or a thousand because you are so much more. You were so much bigger than that, you were bigger than anything I could ever fathom. The regret that I have now–the pain that I have now and the ache and the joy and the happiness and the conflict that I have far exceed the 57 pages I’ve written already. So I’ll keep writing, so that maybe in 10 years or 15 years or 20 or 30 or 50 or 60, I may see you at the end of a page, or in the period at the end of a sentence, or the indent of a new paragraph, or the cardboard backing of my notebook, or the dying eraser at the end of my pencil, or my broken pen with a worn out tip, or the sound of my chair creaking as I get up and walk away from my desk, or the sound of me closing my room and locking it up for good, or the sound of the lock shuttering and the key leaving the socket for the last time, or the clinging of that key as it reaches the ground below my balcony, or the clinging once-more as a bicyclist runs it over. Or maybe I won’t ever find you, and I’ll spend the rest of my life writing until I’m certain or near certain I’ll never find you. The only thing stopping me now is the ink running out of my pen, the dulling of my pencil, the shortening of my eraser, the ripping of my paper, the splintering of my wooden desk, the cracking of my plastic rolling chair, the rusting of my doorknob, the disfiguration of my key, the flattening of that bicyclist’s tire. I’ll never know, and perhaps that’s a good thing.



-


Harmony Patterson is a junior in the arts pathway at Wilson High School. Her hobbies include acting, writing, and reading and tutoring. She is incredibly passionate about her love for English and writing. She prefers to write monologues and scripts, but the occasional poem enters her field of view every so often.

Comments


bottom of page