The piece I made for the Poco Heritage Society shows how I feel, life in quarantine is. I know everybody is in a different situation, but this represents how I, as a student and athlete, am feeling about my situation. First, I want to point out the cage. I usually wouldn’t mind staying inside for months, but the feeling of being FORCED into staying inside is what I don’t like. It feels as though we are in a cage that we cannot leave and sure, we can go outside but not too far. We can’t see friends or anyone outside of our immediate family which I am relating to the bars of the cage. It’s possible to reach out a bit so technically we could leave and we aren’t truly trapped, but that doesn’t mean we are free. The daisy in the middle of the cage is us. Schools, parents, coaches and others expect us to grow and thrive in a confined environment but we cannot live up to our full potential. We are not able to fulfil expectations because we are in a different environment than we are used to making us unable to grow. Our needs to develop mentally, physically, and emotionally are not met and it makes it very difficult to succeed. To break from our buds and mature into flowers, we need to come together (though not literally) and break out of our cages into the new world.

Morgan Kornitsky