The Illusion of Thereness
By Rufayda, Year 10
Loneliness is everything inescapable. You run, or try to, because how can you when it does not follow, but consume? You run, with persisting hope long past its “best before”, and it spreads from your fingertips to your wrists. It weighs them down. You lift a hand to acquaint yourself with the damage but you feel more than you see. It’s why loneliness loves you. Your fingers are numb. Your skin is paling, too, and you wish it were in the illuminating way that might lead you out of this absence of a void, like you’ve known it to be for others—your fatal flaws—but you know it’s the pale of sickness. The process of emptying; you will be a husk.
Aren’t you already?
Surroundings breed products. You think that’s how the saying goes, but you can’t trust yourself. Slowly, inevitably, you stop running and immediately the pressure, the heavy pulling, intensifies. You want to breathe. You can’t. Everyone, you included, thinks it’s as complex as all the kinds of love but it isn’t. It’s as simple as that.
Now that you’re walking through the darkness, you can feel it leave. It slips out like a parting friend through your fingertips—drained. It pushes at your eyes, piling there until you open your mouth for desperate breaths, hoping, pathetically and enduring, the air will make it leave. You’re reduced to a child’s pleas.
“Please.”
“Go away.”
It pushes as your eyes and it drips out. The cavern drips, too.
This vignette, The Illusion of Thereness by Rufayda, was created in Olfactory. Olfactory is a workshop series where students learn about features of discursive writing. They create a series of short responses or segments that will accumulate to become a personal essay about the olfactory world. Students survey their peers as to what is the most ‘puke-worthy’ smell. They develop their very own ‘personality perfume’. Students reflect on and share their personal connections to the world of smells, odours and fragrances. Lynx Africa, anyone? Student will learn about and employ such features as anecdotes, figurative language, factoids, allusion and anaphora.