The Strange Realities from My Soulmate

by Alissa Simon, age 14
Alissa Simon is an eighth grader at Alice Deal, and has been participating in Writopia for about three years. Her current favorite book is The Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. She enjoys reading and writing realistic fiction and poetry, and she has a variety of half-filled notebooks of story ideas. In her free time, she reads (a great amount) of books, listens to music, sleeps, and plays soccer. Writopia has been a very important part of her development as a writer, and she is looking forward to coming back in the future!

“A carbon atom must only have a specific number of protons / A strand of DNA writes novels of identity out of our control / A swipe of scarlet nail lacquer applied without a proper top coat will flake away in a matter of days”

 

Everything has a balance,

A limit.

A rule to abide, or an exception to demonstrate

A carbon atom must only have a specific number of protons

A strand of DNA writes novels of identity out of our control

A swipe of scarlet nail lacquer applied without a proper top coat will flake away in a matter of days

But lying in the soft folds of your bed, hearing soothing fantasies

Of magic and souls, of love and physics

Of time and nebulae

You gain an inkling of

The necessary ingredients for breaking the rules

Why those in conjunction with their other halves always seem to have more power

Why you see so many lost pairs of eyes with holes in the sides of their sneakers from wandering too long on the battered playground

Why an unlikely isotope is the definition of true love

And the government prioritizes maintaining an even population

Does this explain why your eight-year-old body hums with undeniable emptiness?

 

Is there someone out there waiting to turn the universe on its side for you?