Welcome to Takefourmoments. We hope you enjoy your visit.
You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.
Group: Admin
Posts: 81
Member No.: 1
Joined: 3-May 06
I started this story for my short story at school, and got a bit stuck on it. So, I didn't turn it in, but I still want to finish it. What I'm going to post on here is basically just the starter for the story, and pretty much holds the main idea to it all. I'd apperciate the critique, if you all would be willing to give me one.
QUOTE
It’s really a little funny when you realize that you’ve known a group of people your whole life, but you don’t know them at all. That you’ve spent almost 17 years with a the same people, but have never taken the time to sit down and talk to them; to get to know them. It’s amusing, and it’s a little odd. How is it possible to know anyone that long, and never have the smallest urge to say ‘hi’ in the halls, or to wave when you see them?
I grew up in Brookes, Alabama, which is about as small as small towns get. Brookes is one of those towns you read about in books, were the shops are small and homey, the houses are either really close together or much to far apart, the kids play out in the streets safely because the town is too old-fashioned to use cars, while the older folks sit outside and play checkers. It’s got the minimum amount of paved roads it can have, and the ones it does fade into dirt and have a million pot holes in them; pot holes that are filled in with gravel, just to make them seem fixed. Over half the housing in the area have a farm behind it and grow at least one major crop for the town, and neighbors yell across the porches to ask how things are going instead of using a phone. Which, for the record, we do have. Phones are about the only modern thing that goes on in Brookes, along with the internet and the cliques.
Almost every school has them, mine included. We have the popular kids, the geeky/smart kids, the outcasts, the rebels, the skater kids, the jocks, the band-nerds and then there’s just the kids that don’t fit anywhere. And each of these kids only want to hang out with others like them, because things aren’t uncomfortable, things are never weird…they’re simply easy. It’s a safe zone for them, something they can do and not feel like an idiot doing it. And stepping out of your safety zone isn’t easy, in fact, it’s scary. So kids avoid it and they don’t even try crossing the border of the line that blocks them off from the rest of the student body.
I believe that no one ever realizes the difference between knowing someone and really knowing someone. There’s so much to each person you meet, a bigger story then the one you see on the outside, a hidden lie behind the prettiest girls smile, a crazy personality behind the mask of the shyest kid, a dark secret laying behind the innocent eyes of the hottest boy in school…
It’s like a caterpillar, who’s whole life goal is to become this beautiful butterfly. All it has to do is hid it’s self inside a cocoon and then one day, when it’s finally ready, burst free. But, exactly what gives it the motivation to come back out of the cocoon once it’s there; once it’s warm and safe?
Maybe our cocoon is where we put the things we want to hid from everyone, maybe it’s that safe place that makes everything okay so that we can go on and act happy with life…maybe it’s our cocoon that hides the real us from the people we know; the people we think we know. And outside this cocoon, is a world that no one wants to venture in, that no one wants to have to face.
Personally, I never had any plans to even dare go over the edge of my cocoon. I liked being alone inside the warm space. At school, I was always one of the quiet kids, talking only to the one friend I really had and most of the time having my nose in a book. I passed with straight ‘A’s’ and a prefect record each year. I never missed school and I never minded being there. But, I was just a loner. I didn’t like talking in class, because the students could be rude, I didn’t like talking outside of it because I never knew what to say. To me, not talking to anyone; not really knowing anyone, was so much easier.
And then there’s people like Lucas Rune. He’s the type of guy that everyone loves. He’s funny, he’s more then hot and he’s just a all-around nice guy. Star of the basketball team and the only person in our school to not care about the cocoon he was supposed to have. Or, at least, no one believed he cared about it.
When, in fact, Lucas had the biggest secret of us all. And no one knew.
And it seemed it I was going to be the one who found out. It was going to be me that helped Lucas really come out of his cocoon and in the process, I learned what it was like to really know someone outside my safety zone and, most important of all, I learned what it was like to know myself.
The Secrets That Lie, Just Inside Our Cocoon, excerpt from an original piece
