June 3rd | Teen Ink

June 3rd

May 13, 2022
By lenikalei BRONZE, Dallas, Texas
lenikalei BRONZE, Dallas, Texas
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

“If we don’t talk about Bruno then why is there a whole song about him?”

Because at some point, rather sooner than later Bruno does appear. 

He will show up at our front door, 

just like that,

not even with the courage to knock, 

will he storm the house like 

a robber storms a bank; 

Taking everything he can except for 

memories and promises. 

The sad part about this is that we all knew this would happen. 

We all knew it and yet here I am looking at him with fear 

in my eyes and arms up in the air,

while he is threatening me with a ticking time bomb.

But I had too much time to prepare, to adjust 

that this time was spent experiencing. 

Experiencing everything 

that makes it so much harder to welcome Bruno. 


I used to think that 24 hours in a day were too much,

too exhausting.

Learning, socializing, introducing and thinking

made me too tired to be excited for the next day.

Now, I look back and wonder where all those hours went.

Hours in which I got used to routines and people

so much that I forgot how to live without them.

Hours of laughing, traveling and feeling;

too much at once or nothing at all.

Hours of overthinking, worrying while becoming part

of something amazing. 


The author's comments:

I wrote this piece about my exchange year in Dallas, Texas 2021/2022. I am originally from Germany but came to the US for one school year to stay with a host family and experience American school and daily life. Going into this experience, I couldn't have even imagined how amazing it would turn out and how well I would get along with my host family and new friends. 

The opening line in this poem is a reference to the movie "Encanto", especially to the song "We don't talk about Bruno". As we were watching this movie with my two younger host sisters, they asked themselves why there is a song about Bruno, if we shouldn't talk about him. However, "We don't talk about Bruno" has also become a sentence that follows the talk about me leaving and since we are all very sad about that, we don't talk about it. I combined those two meanings, using Bruno as metaphor to reference me saying goodbye,  to write about my mixed feelings which I have about leaving on June 3rd, 2022.  


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