📘 Chapter 6: Echoes Between Verses
335 Words
The lights dimmed again. Clarion Harriet stepped onto the stage, her presence commanding yet graceful. The crowd leaned in. Harizon sat frozen, Zawadi beside him, her earlier glow now shadowed by uncertainty.
Clarion opened her notebook, flipped to a page, and began.
Blueprints
I built a future
Out of recycled dreams
Blueprints drawn in the margins of science books
Where love was a hypothesis
And hope—an unstable compound
I met a boy
Who spoke in equations
But looked at me like I was poetry
He said my ideas were brilliant
But never asked about my fears
I walked away
Not because I didn’t care
But because I needed someone
Who saw the cracks
And stayed anyway
Harizon felt the words hit like raindrops on dry soil. Was that poem about him? The purifier project, the admiration, the silence between them it all fit.
He glanced at Zawadi. She was staring at the stage, jaw tight.
Clarion finished, bowed slightly, and walked off. The applause was thunderous.
Harizon clapped, but his hands felt heavy.
“That was about you,” Zawadi said quietly.
“Maybe,” Harizon replied. “Or maybe it was about someone like me.”
“Does it change anything?”
He didn’t answer.
The next poet took the stage; a boy with dreadlocks and a voice like gravel. His piece was about heartbreak and healing, about choosing yourself even when it hurts.
Harizon barely heard it. His mind was a whirlwind.
Clarion had been his muse. Her brilliance had sparked something in him. But Zawadi… Zawadi had shown him the beauty of staying, of vulnerability, of shared silence.
“I don’t know what I feel,” he admitted.
“That’s okay,” Zawadi said. “Just don’t pretend you don’t feel anything.”
The slam continued. Verses flew like arrows, some missing, some hitting deep. Harizon sat in the middle of it all, a boy caught between two poems, one that once inspired him, and one that now understood him.
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