My Eyes Were Steadfast

2 15-11-2016

I cannot sleep. I try to, but I cannot. I believe it is because I have never slept outside my house for longer than three nights. Everything feels strange; the food, the people, the voices. The one I hate the most is how I feel at night. I cannot stop staring out the window. I don't want to. But I can swear every night someone or people, I cannot be too sure, walk across the school grounds; dressed in white.
I keep imagining the woods are animals out to get me. I am supposed to be sleeping with my head away from the window. But I wanted to see the sky: It makes me feel peaceful. Now I feel as though if I were to sleep with my legs to the window, someone, or something will come for me and pull me out of the dormitory legs first. And boy! Do I not want that.

By the time I hear the bell and get up, I am suffering from too little sleep. I just want to curl up and sleep some more. I go through all the motions of the morning wishing the day was ended.
Class was fun. Until we wrote a pop test and got a free period. I would have been happy but I have not made friends. Everybody is new this year. It is our first year of school. But some people are fortunate to be in the same school as their primary school mates. It is as a result of acute boredom that I begin to think.

I think about my elder sister and how she is very talented. I am very envious of her. I wonder if when I am her age I will have achieved so much as her. Everybody talks about her. All the parents want you to be like her. No matter how comprising a situation gets, she need only be involved and it is settled. I wonder if I will ever command that much respect.
There is my older friend. She is an amazing person. She gets all the praises as well. I am stuck in the middle of two awesome people. Both of them beautiful writers and somehow, in my state of part admiration part envy, there is a great surge of jealousy. I have to write. I have to read. I have to be better than I am. I have to be better than those who make me feel less than adequate. I am just eleven years old. I don't know where all these emotions come out from. But they push me, till my head aches and I pick up a pen.

I start with the regular first writer's topics. Love, friendship, life, war, God, peace, flowers, love. You know the drill. The more I wrote, the more I loved writing, the more I wanted to read, the more constrained I felt against the parameters of Rhyming.
I moved on to essays and short stories and till date, I cannot fully grasp the way writers magically spin us through different lives like a space shuttle maneuvering about boulders in space. I think I can safely say I discovered my gift for editing at fourteen. I would read and correct drafts by my mates and never be able to write beyond the tenth page.
I did not have writer's block. The fuel I used to start my writing career has run out. I was no longer bitter nor jealous. I was just completely mesmerized by what magic people could create.

So I started again, I went back to writing poetry. And I began the whole circle once more. This time, they were longer. And Rhyming was no longer a constraint. I was writing about everything and everyone. And I was writing for myself and for the love of literature. I also began to read a lot of varied books.