The roiling sea Image by Getty Images

Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Julia Schroers, a 14-year-old student from Guilford, CT. You can find more work from our young writers here

In order to be free, your cold brass shackles must fall to the earth, releasing tear dripping wrists. To walk down streets in skin tight jeans or thick dark robes or black stitched hoodies with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.

Contestant: Julia Schroers is a 14-year-old student from Guilford, CT. Image by Courtesy of Julia Schroers

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To sing your words and prayers on the top of your lungs knowing the world will welcome every sweet letter whirled by the wind.

To fly your flag through glowing internet screens and desert skies and feel your nation’s colors ripple through the wind and your skin.

My wrists are free, I think.

But my gold chain Jewish star necklace leaves bullet shaped bruises on my teenage skin every time I lace it around my neck.

And I can walk with such power that my white sneakers leave footprints in the tar black cement, footprints with curls and waist and legs and soul.

So why do eyes follow me like they see only my cracks and crevices, not my sharp tongued words and gasoline dripped poems?

And no rope or tape obstructs my words from emerging, through my warm and angry lips, but when I speak faded ancient prayers or

fresh rainstorm washed research

I am met with eyerolls and cold confusion from indifferent mainstream minds.

And my flag is torn and ragged and

its edges are burnt from protesters fires and heated comments and angry hashtags so I wear it in the

back of my locker or the private instagram accounts and

blue and white blood

pours from behind liberal bandaids and ignorance bleeds with all the stinging of open wounds.

The wind has taken my Judaism and womanism and ripped it through storm clouds of freedom and flat ironed hair of liberty. So my curls and my wrists and my magic making words are burnt and withered and beaten into submission by Netflix documentaries and spray paint swastikas so freedom has an icy and salt-stinging taste.

But within crumbling stone and narrow pathway pain I can see that my freedom is stronger than inked numbers and thundercloud rumblings

it resides in dark wood benches and tall blue sanctuary windows, it glints in candle holder reflections and flies in on a Pesach spring breeze with Elijah, and it rumbles on black chalkboard Hebrew School dust and piles up like magic.

My freedom is in teenage Jewish gatherings, where curls are worn like crowns, my freedom is on Supreme Court marble pillars, carved with care and laced with bravery. And on light-showered stages and campaign trails I see my freedom silently on the lips of the audience. My freedom is walking from crumbling Hebrew-built Egyptian kingdoms and ash drenched German camps with aching backs and high heads.

And my freedom is a place at the podium, a microphone, a canvas, a few moments to share my story or my words.

My freedom is to take my calloused Jewish hands and raise them to the sky freely, to walk into my temple with pride, to paint myself the color of Jewish and women and student and artist and wear those colors wherever I go.

I am free enough to be ignored but not enough to stop dreaming so I will dream of kind comment sections and unarmed security guards until the sea of suffering is split by God’s miracle might and we march to freed wrists and songs of prayers and flags that ripple in warm breezes.

Freedom is to keep walking through the split sea until we reach the dry land.

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