Page 6 - Horizon 18-19

Glossophobia
The Fear of Public Speaking
I see her lips move, but my ears are ringing. I can’t hear. I can’t think. My vision goes blurry. The front of the class moves farther and farther away from me like a cliché filming technique. My body feels warm, a numbing warm that spreads from my sternum to my lungs to each of my limbs until everything is tingling with nervous energy. My heart is pounding so fiercely I can feel its frantic pulse in each of my clammy, twitching fingers.
“Michal? Michal?” the cold bark of her voice snaps me back to reality. “Will you please come up and give your speech?” The class buzzes with murmurs and giggles as I take the walk of shame to that dreaded wooden podium.
Terrin Akstens '19
How It Once Was
As I was walking around for our first hour or so in the art museum, I wandered into the American Colonization exhibit. I was intrigued by the landscape paintings. I studied all of the pure fields and trees, rivers and mountains, blue skies and red moons. Such vast lands back then, such tall mountains. It was the new world; untouched by man’s greedy hands and colonized minds. These old paintings of landscapes and mountains should have left me appreciating nature, and the perfect beauty it possessed, but they didn’t. Thinking, “bullshit” is how they left me. The selfish humans who have demolished lands of trees and poured cement over pristine soil have ruined future opportunities for people like me to ever see the beautiful views they had taken for granted. Think about it, the only way we encounter these views are through old, crippled paintings you can only experience as a secondary source IF you go to a museum.
What ever happened to mountains being bigger than man? It seems that a mountain is nothing compared to the tall buildings I drive past every day. We have ruined nature's original state of being. We will never know how earth appeared in its natural form because we completely destroyed it.
Chloe Amoroso '20
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