there is something artful in the way water falls. 

maybe i’ve written too much recently and i’m grasping at straws for what is considered poetic, but i’m sitting on my bathroom counter with my feet in the sink and my thighs sticking to the marble and i’m staring at my skin’s texture, and perhaps i’m the last one to find this out, but us humans are so hungry for simplicity that we miss the simplest of beauties falling in water streams right under our noses. 

 

i’ll watch the extra oat milk dripping down the side of my coffee cup and think: i could write about that. i’ll be sitting in the back left corner of my english classroom watching my friends scrunch up their faces in errant laughter and think: wow, i should write that down.

 

i drink tea out of fancy cups. i spend eight dollars on oatmilk lattes because i’m out with my friends and i’m happy and i want to. i visit my fourth-grade teacher and bring her peanut butter cups because they’re her favorite and because i feel like it. 

 

we suffer so much by ourselves. we wake up in the mornings and realize it’s so terribly hard to get out of bed, we have to force ourselves to brush our teeth and not melt into a sticky puddle in the middle of our living room carpets, and our hair falls out and our thumb pads lose grip and we watch as we lose ourselves, and we die twice. 

 

i jot down pretty words on the skin of my palm. i write poetic sentences and tuck them away for a future project. i let my hands dance across my keyboard and wrangle meaningless words into artful paragraphs because i want to. i make poetry out of everything, because if i don’t, i’ll find a hole between my fourth and fifth rib and i’ll lacerate myself to my core. if i don’t live kindly, i won’t do so at all. 

 

so instead of asphyxiating on simplicity, i watch the extra oat milk drip down the side of my coffee cup and i write about it. i watch my friends burst into ugly laughter as we sit in the back left corner of our english classroom and i think about how much i love it here. 

 

i sip my tea out of the fancy cup i got for three dollars at a thrift store. i let myself splurge on eight-dollar lattes when i’m out with my friends and i’m happy. i spend my extra few cents on peanut butter cups for my fourth-grade teacher because they’re her favorite and because i feel like it. 

 

i pull out my pen and i write about the artful way that water falls.

Halle Ewing (she/they) is a 14-year-old from Orange County with a love for the written word. She finds herself reflected in the lines she writes, and when they aren’t frantically trying to remember that one word on the tip of their tongue, they’re drinking way too much coffee, playing water polo, or begging her friends to take pictures of them. Their work can be found in Paper Cranes Literary Journal, Crossed Paths, and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and the Weight Journal. Her instagram handle is @halleewingg.