Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
Erin Bundock, a junior at Champlain Valley Union High School, wrote this piece in response to a Young Writers Project prompt about finding a tunnel and exploring where it leads.
Tunnel Vision
By Erin Bundock
[I] found a tunnel with golden moonbeams and unplanned decisions, and from the bricked ceilings there hung captured memories reflecting against the glass of the shattered Coke bottle chandeliers.
As I walked, my dreams that painted the walls began to peel and curl away from my palms and the rough insides of the tunnel. Glowing Mason jars illuminated the tattoos scrawling over my skin before fading, like ink dancers in water. Though they disappeared, I felt them still; they were waiting for someone else’s light to discover them again.
In the distance, a shuffle of feet echoed into my heart, dragging me forward through the darkening hall. The smell of cinnamon and ocean fell into my mind as the tunnel narrowed, the coarse walls scraping my fingertips as I ran them across the seams of the bricks. And I stumbled over my thoughts and the stinging of my tattoos, tripping over shards of broken bottles, pushing the walls away, only to find the floor.
And then I found a hand, a smile, and small creases next to young eyes. I found the strange familiar shuffle; comfort in a foreign giggle I had always heard, even if it had only been dream-painted on the walls. I found a gait in a skip of heart beats I had never felt. I found a light to my tattoos; the smell of sunscreen dancing in the heat of that sun.
It’s in those irises that you ask yourself, “They mean the world to you, don’t they?”
A whole planet could fall away, but they’re all you’d see.
It was before those irises that I’d never believed blind spots so large could be caused by two small hearts.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.