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Young Writers Project: 'Tunnel Vision'

Tunnel Vision
By Erin Bundock
Grade 11, Champlain Valley Union High School

I found a tunnel with golden moonbeams and unplanned decisions, and from the bricked ceilings there hung captured memories reflecting against the glass of the shattered Coke bottle chandeliers.
    As I walked, my dreams that painted the walls began to peel and curl away from my palms and the rough insides of the tunnel. Glowing Mason jars illuminated the tattoos scrawling over my skin before fading, like ink dancers in water. Though they disappeared, I felt them still; they were waiting for someone else’s light to discover them again.
    In the distance, a shuffle of feet echoed into my heart, dragging me forward through the darkening hall. The smell of cinnamon and ocean fell into my mind as the tunnel narrowed, the coarse walls scraping my fingertips as I ran them across the seams of the bricks. And I stumbled over my thoughts and the stinging of my tattoos, tripping over shards of broken bottles, pushing the walls away, only to find the floor.
    And then I found a hand, a smile, and small creases next to young eyes. I found the strange familiar shuffle; comfort in a foreign giggle I had always heard, even if it had only been dream-painted on the walls. I found a gait in a skip of heart beats I had never felt. I found a light to my tattoos; the smell of sunscreen dancing in the heat of that sun.
    It’s in those irises that you ask yourself, “They mean the world to you, don’t they?”
    A whole planet could fall away, but they’re all you’d see.
    It was before those irises that I’d never believed blind spots so large could be caused by two small hearts. 

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