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Dakota Svec is now a freshman communications major at Endicott College. She’s always had a love for writing and is just now starting to write creatively. She hopes to continue to grow and get more of her work published.

Looking At a Stranger

Dakota Svec

Her face is different now.
Slimmer.
Older.
Prettier in a way.
But sadder.
Run down.
Those Eyes though,
I remember,
Unlike anything else.
Deep blue.
Holding small rings of yellow.
Saturn sitting in deep space.
But now I can see only the outsides.
Sunken in.
Dark seas of deep purple,
That wash up onto the shores of her cheeks.
Those seem stronger.
Bones more defined.
The face of adolescence withered down by time. 
Glazed over by waves from saturn’s seas. 
Droplets that run down to her mouth.
Onto full, soft, lips that actually seem almost the same.
But I see it now,
Even they too have changed. 
More hesitant than ever before.
Choking on each word.
Fighting to digest each anxiety.
A throat used only to swallow her thoughts.
Protected by a neck barely there,
Scratched and rubbed raw.
Skin all the way down a breaking body,
Irritated beyond recognition.
Barely covering her heart,
Doing its best to beat,
After being so repeatedly tattered and torn.
A frail frame,
Standing in place of someone I used to know.
A girl.
Turned inside out.
Eaten alive.
And I watched it all.
Changes that happened so slowly over time,
That I saw no change at all.
How did I let you get this way?
How did I let you fall so far?
How did I let the world break and bruise so many pieces of you?
What was once so familiar to me,
Now completely unrecognizable.
The face.
The body.
The ones I’ve lived in all this time.
No longer my own.

— Dakota Svec

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dougholder@post.harvard.edu