These entries from August's challenge were selected as Honorable Mentions. Those who completed this challenge are now encouraged to share their stories in the comments section of the "August Writing Challenge."
Charlotte Bruce
15
UK
Quentin perched on the rock, bouncing back on his heels to regain the balance he momentarily lost. He placed his hands down, flinching at the sudden searing cold of the dampened surface and squinting against the blazing rays of the newly risen sun. He smiled a proud smile, his mouth stretched wide as he inhaled all the moisture the air had to offer. Excitement pulsed through his veins and raced up his spine, causing every muscle in his body to stand to attention.
Armani climbed precariously up beside him, shaking her mass of frizzy hair away from her face. Laughing, she too rocked back on her heals beside her brother, ruffling the limp, black hair in front of his eyes.
“We did it, Q,” she whispered, her eyes wide.
Q laughed and looked about him at the abundance of trees that formed a shadowing ring, onlooking the millions of travelling water droplets racing one another across the rock, sliding into oblivion, plummeting into the unknown.
Watching the water reminded Q of himself — however odd that sounded. He never knew where his imagination would take him next. He lived inside his head. The world around him igniting sparks of creativity and powering yet another story to be scrawled in the back of his notebook.
Birds cheeped at one another, jostling in the trees to obtain the best view of the new-comers. By now, another sister crouched on the other side of Q, she too interpreting the depths of the mass of nature that surrounded them. Minutes, maybe even hours, of awe passed. The jungle eerily quiet in the momentary absence from the bickering of the birds.
The trio stood up suddenly, each startled by a deep rumbling sound travelling from the trees. They gripped hands, each clammier than the next. Q turned to squint into the darkness, however, failed to recognise the origin of the sound. He noticed deep gashes in a sample of the ring of trees, like fresh scars in flesh. Where did they come from? Who or what made them?
Silence. The birds had disappeared, flown away to safety. Q, Armani, and Blake’s muscles were paralysed. Each and every muscle ceased to exist for just a moment. Their breathing shuddering, straining in and out and in and out, quickening pace at each new sound.
Snapping sounds. All of them turned to greet the cause of the broken branches which had fallen prior to their presence. Blake whimpered in fear, and tears, hot and sticky, clung to her face, stinging against the cold. Q’s eyes flashed her a warning of silence. More snapping. The crackling of broken twigs grew louder and louder as the rain began to patter on the rock, the deafening roar of the waterfall increasing faster and faster. Falling at a ferocious, deadly velocity.
Their T-shirts clung to their bodies, and water slid and dripped off their faces, disguising Blake’s tears. It was becoming harder and harder to cling to the rock, and their sneakers soon began the decent towards the end of the ledge. More cracking, closer and closer. The only way out? Down.
“You know what we have to do,” yelled Q over the rumble, rain, and roar of rushing water. Both girls nodded reluctantly. Blake let out a whimper of terror. A deafening screech erupted from the trees, and out sprung a creature of a ferocious capacity — each of its claws a sharpened blade.
They each fell heavily to the rock floor and quickly became caught up and swept along in the rush of water, their hands broken apart. The creature bounded behind them, defying and conquering the strength of the water. They needed to escape, but how?
Quentin perched in solitude amongst the fabric of his many trousers and T-shirts. The remnants of youthful imagery still sparkling before his eyes. He rocked back on his heels, just as he had done before, to rest his back against the back of his small wardrobe. He could still feel the creature bounding in and around his favourite T-shirt and his best trousers and his big sisters standing on the moist rock beside him. He screwed up his eyes once more, desperate to carry on his adventure, but he couldn’t claw it back. He pushed open his wooden doors and clambered out of his wardrobe into his bedroom. He slid his notebook from under his pillow, his pen poised over a clean page to write his new adventure.
“Quentin, sweetie, time for dinner!” his mother called from the kitchen.
He sighed, sliding his notebook back under the secrecy of his pillow. He’ll have to write another time. Maybe one day he will be a real explorer. One day I will be, he thought. He might even take on the jungle.
Megan Matilda Bennett
18
England
Abseiling Out of an Abyss
I was, I have been, I am thinking.
For quite some time now, I have been thinking on this precipice that has so many more subtle meanings than the literal rock, jutting out over the edge of the water that I am standing on now. I suppose this is how Medieval sailors might have felt as their sterns trespassed the horizon, into oblivion: the end of the flat world.
Admittedly, the view here is a great deal more beautiful than what I imagine oblivion to be like. Verdant, dappled light caresses the stern rock face and turbulent waters like my grandmother once stroked my stern and turbulent, angst-ridden head. In short, it is a grand place to die.
The last few months have been hard, too hard, and the abyss of thoughts which has dragged my mind to this profoundly dark place, I am sure will be sufficiently weighty to drag me the last hundred or so metres to the bottom of the waterfall at my feet.
The problem is the thoughts never mean anything; they just go on and on, on and on, until eventually, they adopt that same strange quality that words repeated many times sometimes do, losing all their original meaning and simply becoming a collection of static images. I inevitably associate those images with fear, and a pathetic kind of fear at that; the qualms of a middle-upper-class teenage boy, not the haunting anxieties, I imagine, that my Syrian refugee human counterparts might be facing on any given day.
Having exhausted every therapy, every medication, in this abyss, I see one option: to die, be euthanised and finally absolved of my existentialism and miscellaneous mental health issues — and in that idea, I find a kind of morbid hope. I planned my suicide, the way the terminally ill plan their funerals and the terminally deluded plan their victims’ murders. I have written letters to all those I love, begged God not to damn me for taking what was not the easy option but the only option I had in the Test of Life, and spent my savings on buying each person I love a diary to offer them the escapism and solicitude, in coming to terms with what I am sure will be the most selfish thing I will ever do, that writing has always offered me.
I am ready and I —
“JACK, STOP!” I hear and am instantaneously halted in the process of taking my own life.
I turn and see my two angel-haired sisters running at me through the woods to my right. Their words tumble out in a melee of hysteria, but I can divine something definitive from them, repeated I-love-you’s that reverberate in my ever troubled mind with the clarity of the dawning chorus of many birds. They hurtle towards me and rapidly navigate their way across the rocks. I am nervous watching them do that; whilst I suffer from a complete disregard for my own mortality, I do still fear for the lives of my loved ones.
They reach me and set me down gently like the broken child of the universe that I am and gather me into their arms, and I swear no bad thought, no bad worry, no bad image could pervade that embrace.
Ramona, my youngest sister, speaks: “I love you. I love, Jack. Do you understand that? In that terrible moment when you were about to jump, I just wanted you to know that.”
“I love you, Ramona, and you too, Ava,” I say to my other sister.
“We found your letters and the diaries,” she replies, by way of explaining their presence here, and abruptly I know something to be decisively, irrefutably true: words will be the thing to save me. In fact, they already have.
I was thinking.
I have been thinking.
I am thinking.
I will continue thinking.
Note from the author: Suicide is NOT euthanasia (as my protagonist mistakenly thinks).
Click here for a list of suicide hotlines in the US, or click here for a list of suicide hotlines in every country.
Johanna
19
Germany
Glasses
We used to be four. Me and Alex, Bailey, and Lucas. Bailey and Lucas, Alex, and Me. The perfect combination. We were everything. Now I am nothing.
I know you’re only reading this because you saw the picture. The picture of Bailey, Lucas, and me, sitting on the edge of a cliff, enjoying life as carefree young adults. Let me just tell you: Don’t trust everything you see with your eyes. It’s not your eyes that are the problem; it’s the glasses we look through. Experience, hurt, prejudice, pride — all those are glasses that we look through. They help us to process what we see, but they also have the power to kill us. They killed Alex.
Alex jumped off the cliff we are sitting on, only three days before the picture was taken. Did he kill himself? Yes. Did he want to kill himself? Who knows. He believed lies. He was ill. He died.
Alex’s glasses were particularly bad. I know now that the glasses he looked through were those of mental illness. He didn’t choose them; they chose him. He was unprepared; he didn’t know how to get help. I was unprepared; I didn’t know he needed help. I wanted him to look through my glasses, wanted him to see how my love for him made him enough. Made him perfect. But it doesn’t work that way. I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t save him, and there is nothing I regret more.
His death destroyed me. It destroyed my friendship with Bailey and Lucas. It made me jealous of everyone who has love in their life. It made me hate myself, the fact that I survived. I am a survivor of suicide, but I can’t accept it. How can it ever be fair that I get to live? How can it be fair that I will love again?
How is it fair that it didn’t actually destroy me — that I will laugh again and will remember his laugh less and less.
Mental illness isn’t fair. It’s the enemy. But if there is any sense in his death, let it be to prevent others.
We need to start the conversation. Whether you live with mental illness yourself, or you live with it through loved ones: Share your experience. Talk about it! Let people know what you know; it might save their life. Everybody needs to know the symptoms, the signs, and where to get help. There cannot be any shame or fear of labels. We are not crazy; we are ill. And illnesses can be treated. Always.
Malavika Doshi
17
India
I Feel Alive
I look at him. Ten days into the wild, he looks unhappy about not shaving. But to me, he looks just as attractive as the day I fell in love with him.
Sitting on the soft, green moss, I feel the water on my neck, as if gently kissing me. Yet again, I am reminded of the night we first kissed. His soft lips, against mine. It was one of the best breathless moments.
I look at Tamara, who is sitting right next to him. I am reminded of the ten-year-old friendship we shared. I knew how sweet she liked her coffee, her favorite paperback, her favorite season, and everything about her. She did too. And above all, if one night I decided to cry my eyes out because of something, or someone, I know she wouldn’t let me. She’d catch my tears and hold me for as long as I needed to be held, and it all comes down to that. Genuine friendships.
I look around.The beauty around us makes me feel light, and leaves me in retrospection.
I look back at how far I’ve come and how thankful I am. I feel alive after soo long. I lift my hands up, close my eyes, and feel like I’m in a state of trance. I feel alive. I finally feel what I am supposed to feel.
A few weeks into throwing away all the drugs, today, I feel alive without any. I was thrilled. He holds me against him and even though we’ve been together for quite some time now, I go breathless for a moment. It felt like time had stopped. Just for us. He kisses my forehead. I make myself comfortable under his chin. I then hear Tamara say, “Let me in too! I want to be a third wheel and not a unicycle for some time!”
We pull her closer, and then we laugh. We laugh loud. I feel everything to be a dream. Six months ago, sitting on my bunk at the rehab, I never thought I would ever feel alive. We hold each other close, feel each other’s breath, and I haven’t felt this secure in days. In the midst of nature, I felt secure. They made me feel home.
Talking of the stars, his shoes, Tamara’s first crush, and small, probably insignificant things, I still felt ecstatic, and I don’t mean the drug here. I felt alive and in a state of ecstasy, secure and home. It was more than what I could have ever asked for.
Now, I know my feeling alive is, perhaps, just a small, insignificant thing for you, but if you have ever held on to the smallest ounce of hope you’ve managed to not lose and faithfully prayed to make it through one day, without having a breakdown, or you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror with tears blurring your vision, begging yourself to hold on, you’d probably know.