Flow by Imani-Unheri Whyte (17, Pennsylvania)

My life can be described as an indescribable monotony. Each day I wake up and leave my soft bed (my sleep never lasts long enough.) Each day I do tasks that seem to regenerate. Each day I take a nap at 3:00 p.m. Each day I engage in simple and meaningless conversations. Each day I eat, but I retain no sustenance. Each day. Each day bleeds into the other like the blood coursing through my veins, traveling to my heart and my lungs and my brain. 

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I only go to sleep to wake up tomorrow, but there is no tomorrow. My days are uniform; they are an army marching in step.  My days are perfectly blended like paint. My days are turtles and sloths. 

​I’m trapped in a spiral. I’m on a carousel, and I can't touch the golden ring that shines in the moonlight. I'm imprisoned in the current of a waterfall that sends me crashing down on the rocks below. Again and again and again. I am in a fuzzy state, drifting above the earth, touching stars, and I’m choking because I have no air. Losing track of the date, of the month, of the year. I am a somnambulist, a ghost in this confusing world where the nights look like days. I am a leaf laying on the concrete, and I only move because of the gentle wind that comes through each day.