Hi there! So I completed a timed creative practice and would greatly appreciate some feedback
- particularly about whether or not I answered the question correctly (as this is always where I loose the most marks).
QUESTION:Compose a piece of imaginative writing that focuses on the feeling of
excitement or
pleasure caused by a discovery. Use the image as a significant part of your response (I've attached the image for reference).
My earliest memory of my mother was watching her dance. She danced as though she were dancing on clouds, while I watched her in the sky, scared to step off the pathway up high and never being able to reach her. I watched as she whimsically whipped her tulle tutu around her slim body, never quite touching the clouds but always coming close. She danced with the melody, as the music swirled around her fluid movements. Up high in the sky, illuminated by the delicate golden tones of the sun, she was incandescent. The pathway to my mother would extend briefly when she took my hand and whisked me backstage. But afterwards my mother would float away from my grasp and become, once again, unreachable.
As a young girl, I attempted to build a pathway to my mother who danced in the sky. The baby pink ballet slippers comforted my small feet at the age of five. They were a beautiful beginning to what would be an inelegant end. Small ballerinas would line up on the barre and begin their routines. Our small legs would collapse under the strain of grande plies. We were unsteady but eager to explore this new world, like foals unsteady on their feet. Every now and then my mother would temporarily retreat down from her world up high in the clouds. She would run her kind hands gently across our bent arms and whisper, “lift up through your back”. Then she would ascend to her world of regality; a place I wished so desperately to be. I felt forever stuck on a pathway to nowhere in the clouds, so close to my mother, but so far away. My childhood was made up of these moments. The stale smell of the shoe shop, filled with the aroma of leather and lace, my mother trying on a shoe, bringing herself down towards the ground, where I waited eagerly in earnest. Looking up towards her, I never comprehended that she might begin to look down upon me.
The pointe shoe was cold and wooden, not as easily accepting as the slipper that had nurtured my feet in their tenderest years. I struggled to rekindle my dwindling interest, just as I fumbled miserably, trying to reach into the clouds and grasp hold of my mother. My muscles had become taut, entwined around my bones like the ribbons around my calves. I stood in the ballet studio, which was once full of life and warmth, but had now become cold and drab. My mother watched me from her position in the clouds with a long, hard stare. I mustered up the courage to ask, “have I let you down?” The silence that followed shattered into my skin like shards of glass. In a tone void of emotion, she replied, “no.” Her words pierced my pride, especially as I looked down at the beguiling pointe shoes in my hands, shimmering and strong. They masked my twisted and contorted feet, pushed to conform. I felt my mother drift endlessly away from me, hidden from me forever by the furling grey smoke of the clouds.
That night, after wallowing in my sadness, I made my way along that short path in the sky and found that it ended at my mother’s room. But when I pulled away the clouds, I found my mother, legs pulled tightly into her chest, with swollen, red eyes that matched my own. The image silenced and stunned me. My mother was always so regal and prim, but now she looked bent and twisted. With a voice full of sorrow and crackling with regret, she uttered, “I’m sorry”. I felt the path under my feet begin to extend towards my mother in the middle of the sky, and I slowly began to follow it. With each new step, excitement began bubbling up inside of me, as my vision of her began to appear glassy, as though I could finally see her without the white tufts of smoke swirling around her.
“For what?” I naively asked, stepping too far off the edge of my path in eagerness.
“Because I used you to keep myself interested in the one thing that holds something for me”, she added, and I saw her body deflate.
The path was now directly at my mother’s feet, for the first time ever. I felt a relief wash over me, as though I were finally able to untie the metal chains that twisted elegantly around my legs. My mother stepped from the weightless clouds, and joined me on my path. I realised that my mother was foolish for making me go through her pain, but I also felt free. I had built my footpath in the clouds since I was a child, always aiming for one destination. And I had finally reached it. My mother was no longer untouchable or far from my reach. I didn’t have to extend my despaired hands hopelessly into the clouds to find her, because she was standing right in front of me.
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Topic: Timed creative help! (Read 1105 times)