Young Writers Project is a creative, online community of teen writers and visual artists that started in Burlington in 2006. Each week, VTDigger publishes the writing and art of young Vermonters who post their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for youth, ages 13-19. To find out more, please go to youngwritersproject.org or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org; (802) 324-9538.
If lovers are drawn together like magnets, then sometimes friends and even strangers are pulled together by a more peculiar force in the universe — one that cannot be explained by romance, but which comprises a bizarre attraction nonetheless. These bonds are like yin and yang, this week’s featured poet, Quinn Brubaker of Shelburne, suggests, and it’s stolen glances and nonverbal communication that form the unusual yet warm language of such relationships.
Yin and yang
Quinn Brubaker, 13, Shelburne
And then there were two,
sitting on a bench by the bus stop.
Waiting.
Watching.
Two kids — teenagers —
on different sides of the same story.
One representing tails,
the other, heads.
One representing yin,
the other, yang.
It’s not like they are friends.
They don’t have to be.
They’re not enemies.
They can’t be.
There are two puzzle pieces in their minds that can only be filled with the other’s presence.
This is not a love story.
It’s a story of a friendship that cannot be.
Why, no one knows.
Possibly their own human stubbornness is keeping them apart.
Perhaps it’s their foolishness,
their obliviousness.
They refuse to smile at each other but steal glances instead,
and the eye contact
says more than anything.
The yin has a story
she won’t say out loud.
The yang
won’t open up,
or share
or engage.
They both have their lives and their loves and their frustrations.
They both have backgrounds,
stories.
But because
they are different,
opposites,
they will never speak,
because they are scared
to open
their hearts
and their minds.
So
there were two
sitting on that bench,
not acknowledging
but never completely ignoring each other either.
A sort of perfect,
balanced
in-between
of yin
and yang.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Young Writers Project: ‘Yin and yang’.