This was written by Zoe's friend and posted on her blog. She was home schooled during grades K-5 and is currently a freshman in High School. The beauty and maturity of this piece just blow me away.........can you believe she's only 14?!
Our life is never just ours. Everyone one of us has some piece of everyone else inside of them. We all know how everyone else thinks, and what they think. There are no secrets in our lives, which makes them blessedly simple. We never would want to lie anyway. We are so closely interlocked together that we think as one body, and only sense different things. We don't fear our deaths, for we are each other, and when we die, we still live on in our world. There are some among us who are practically immortal, and even a few of us come from less fortunate places, where the only way to survive was to join a new colony. Although that in itself is almost unspeakable. But at times, we take in new bodies, when we pity the destruction of their colony. If we all die, we lose everything, and if only one lives, we lose even more.
We lift our faces to the sun, take in the warmth, bless its existence. The clouds swirl around us, and if we listen closely, we can hear the birds, the hum of the crickets, and the singsong voice who dances into our conciousness. We do very little, but we never tire of our lives. Outsiders might say that our life is drear and bleak, but for us to live any other way would take all the color and vivacity out of our world. This we know for certain.
Today it rains. The soft carress of each droplet invigorates us, and we can almost taste the fresh scent of the air around us. The sun shines while the rain falls, casting our valley in sparkling diamonds, filling it with beams of light. Our spirits lift, and the breeze catches us up and we sway gently to some foreign rhythm.
The clouds float away, and our valley bursts open in sunlight, and the water trickles into the dirt and invigorates us. We go about our daily routines, preparing our food, taking in sunshine.
Most days, something comes and steals some of us away. We do not mourn, they still live with us, and we have many more in our colony. We will not lose and die away as easily as our brothers and sisters did. Our predators do not frighten us, but we respect and almost love them. They need us, and we have never been selfish.
The sun begins to droop. Long shadows begin to appear. Shadows that I know well, and yet some are different. Longer than us, but not surpassing our trees and hills.
Yes, these shadows are different. They are moving, awkwardly. One jerks strangely from one side to another. Shrill cries seem to come from their direction. They trample some of us, and our petals float delicately, if not indignantly, to the ground.
The shadows stop by me. The one seems to go limp, almost. A piercing, drawn out scream enters every cell of our being, and every atom in me is fiercely crying to stop.
The larger shadow's hand, arm, comes up and then down in a swooping motion, and the one being restrained suddenly stops screaming. A helpless, choking gurgle fills the valley, and then it is all silent again.
The shadow tramps away again. We pull back as far away from the other as our bindings will let us.
The sun is nearly down now. We remember our task at hand, and put the shadows out of our mind. We hardly have to, for they are almost gone as it is.
We raise our faces skyward, and continue on.
©The Author.....name withheld
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