I Know Of A Place

• Joshua Bourke, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2014

I know of a place where objects try to move on their own, where animals wish they can talk and where people believe they can’t die. Though this place is dark and withering because of the atmosphere put here by its inhabitants. In this place, people don’t talk any longer about their issues, or communicate to each other about their fears; people from here constantly show their happiness and joy towards everything in their daily lives, as a disguise to hide the fact that they are decaying away and dying on the inside. This is because they believe that the future only holds bad news and negative outcomes, and the past is what really matters, that anything that may be or is tragic and cataclysmic is what is important. This belief quickly affects everyone from this foreign place. Both old and young, rich and poor, happy and sad. The people from here cling onto their shadows that follow them, as if it is their only safety net, as if there is something or someone about to steal everything from them. Someone who will take everything away just to watch them crumble and fall.

The people from this foreign place treat each other in a horrid way, cursing at each other, shoving each other and making each other feel that they are in the wrong for everything they do. This place grows darker and withers more to every bad or negative insult, gesture or action to another person, things slowly begin to decay even when they shouldn’t, the most beautiful of things are beginning to die and everyone is losing their hope in almost anything that is of importance. People here have high expectations of how people treat each other, they corrupt people around them into believing the negative things and blind them from seeing the positives.

?This place is very far away from you humans, but it is still very close to me. No human has ever discovered this place, and they are sure to never discover it either. This is because this place is indeed in my mind, inside my crazy ball of energy contorting itself around and around trying to figure itself out. This place represents my battle for survival in the society that I live in, it represents the pain that I have endured by others thoughts and actions, it shows my constant dread for the future and what it may bring. This place describes how I feel about todays society and its values and beliefs, this place holds all of my feelings towards our society and how it has become a rivalry among the young ones and a fight for survival for the older generation. Though the happiness that people can see in this place, displays my tiny glimpse of hope that the world will become a better place, without all of its corrupt governments, its stupid values and beliefs, and its insistent negativity towards some of the brightest and most beautiful living things.