cadence chung
to adolescence
Cracking shoes soles flopping their limp
tongues; leather in rivulets
split like fat cherries we all need
to get our shoes re-soled.
I thought they would last for all
of high school, my friend says
and tells us about how he argued
with his dad about buying new ones
and I remember that we are still young
enough to be petty. I know I’m
wrong, he says but he still refuses
to yield. We all want
to be better than the adults to stand
up for ourselves, for rooms of
people to applaud when we fight
back against their shrewd comments
But our feet are worn from walking
up staircases to classes and classes
(and classes), I wonder how many words
I have written; I feel I am overflowing
with gerunds and verbs and nouns, I
will spill them out and the room
will flood with my knowledge ever
growing; I am beginning to know
so many things. My mother tells me
I am lucky to have a head of facts
musty and yellowing like old textbooks
that make you cough when opened.
I have grown several inches, the hems
of my dresses brush above my
knees where before they were
calf-length; the faces around me
are bursting with fresh pimples fit to
clamp between fingers, yellow liquid
weeping like the foyer of students after
that nonsensical Algebra exam. The sounds
from the music room are growing tolerable
and I look around for the dropkicks
to find a room full of sweaty teenagers with fingers
that move smoothly across keys, the smell of that
woody room has become so familiar, a
comforting blend of unwashed hair
and buzzing nylon strings and the deep, earthy
guts of a piano. Be careful, boys,
is all the teacher says when some kids
start to dissect the upright in the corner
and I realise that he trusts them I realise
that people now trust me
to do things, to reply to emails
and sign with ‘Kind regards’, that I
have obligations to fufill, that I am relied
on; this thought makes me wish to go
back to when all that mattered was my battered
copy of How to be a Cat, a book
warning against wishes; I guess I’m not
taking its advice very well but I am still
young even though I can feel myself
becoming older each day, the sun blistering
my eyes and dabbing freckles onto the side
of my nose. I am getting older
but I don’t feel wiser only more aware
of how big this place is
that I will have to live in. How the crowds
swim in each other’s breath how they
buzz together a swarm an infection
hot and oozing. I am nothing but a cell
in this great beast; but I’ll keep doodling
in the corners of my workbook, and
laugh too loudly in the corridors
where my voice weeps into the ears
of everyone around me, nothing but a vibration
in the eardrums. I am still young
and I can do these things; I can split words
down the middle and shape them
into glimmering shards of nonsense and can
get away with it. I am young and yet
I can feel myself growing up.
Cadence Chung is a high school student who loves storytelling, no matter the medium. She is inspired by classic literature and finds it fascinating how our past has influenced so many of our current-day attitudes.