Vivacious

• Arabella Sewell, Grade 10, West Wallsend High School -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Write Along 2018' competition

There was a driving passion within her to release her most inner desires and stories that she believed no one would care to know. Her fingers were clumsy on a keyboard and phone screen, though her hands worked elegantly with a pencil upon paper. Her love for writing was only known to few, the anxiety of others knowing and ridiculing her for her passion tormented her when asked to read her answers in English class, her immeasurable lexicon rather advanced for her year. She was Philomath, addicted to learning anything she could get her hands upon, a prospect her peers alienated her for.
To her peers she spoke in more informal phrases, forcing her intelligence to lock itself away in a vault and allow the stream of curse words and butchered English to flow from her lips. Even if she wished to use such powerful locution, she knew she would seem more anachronistic than she was comfortable with. The facade held up enough for the others to accept her, though she didn’t enjoy their company much, small words and bland ideas often irritating her during classes she was passionate about.
Though when the girl was alone, safe from the scornful glances of fellow students, she allowed the vault door to open and let the words she treasured out into the vast space of her consciousness.
Words as wonderful as the delicate sounding “vivacious”, the rough “cantankerous” and the beautiful “cachinnate”. Words so frail and rare she didn’t dare share them with others, keeping them inside glass cases in her mind to protect them from the dust that was modern technology and colloquialism, only releasing them when her graphite touched the finest of parchment.
Hours of slang and truncated words on her brain felt like a drought, the bright words a flowing creek that washed over every crack of her troubled and dejected ideas, transforming them into masterpieces of literary wonders. Diving into that creek of tinkling existential thoughts opened her mind to see the most wonderful and morose of things, feel emotions that have no names and are only experienced by yourself. She could speak in aureate diction without fearing the judgmental and subjective glares her peers displayed when she let some of her ideas slip past her commonly sealed lips.
Keeping her works to herself, she feared others reading her piece and offering her the cruelest criticism and force feelings of regret upon her. To have something she cherished torn into ribbons, burned by another’s opinions and left for her to cling to the small shreds of what was left of her precious writing.
From that scope of pure imagination that she held, she created people and places she lived vicariously through, supplementing her need for adventure and desire to escape the small cage that was her hometown. She found bliss in knowing that though she was alone, she had a place where she truly belonged, sitting at a writing desk with an abundance of words.