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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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 your hands,
they are storytellers they shake with the faults you've written in their creases.  a man stands in the corner of my room. he’s been there for as long as i can remember, although i know he had to have arrived at some point. when i was younger, i would hide from him. i changed clothes under the covers, hiding my small body from his unblinking eyes. instead of speaking, i whispered, so as not to disturb him. at the age of seven, my mother found an old cd player at the dump, complete with a one direction cd that jolted through stand up and skipped over one thing. i plugged in that cd player and i danced. i faced the man. i sang “everyone else in the room can see it” and i moved my hips like the girls on tv and i bit my lip and i danced.
 I am trapped in darkness
But it’s better, some say To forever live in darkness than to ever see the light  The metallic air hangs heavy with the deafening silence of war. I cannot hear, nor see, nor remember; I am as ancient stones underground must be – laying still and unmoving in the earth as extreme pressures crush them; having experienced so much that all they can bear to be is cold, ashen granite. Into this abyss comes, as from a faraway fantasy, birdsong; a high trill of youth, hope and light, reaching me in my darkness. The sound feels strange in this grey, bleak desolation, like the ghost of happiness, like a figment of some faithful imagination. All at once, I am pulled back and my senses are assaulted, making me dizzy and turning the edges of my awareness fuzzy as nausea settles into the pit of my stomach.
 the purple lights start to fade, the crowd dying with them.
your eyes once hidden in the crowd glow vermillion, failing to camouflage themselves beneath the shadows of your white pupil, an outcast among the filthy onyx pupils bulging at the centers of the undressed dancers’ eyes.  i didn’t want to learn the name of
the wells above your furrowed flour brows you solemnly set down your mug crunch. syrup fills my lungs in a breath that holds me whisked to wonder when the air turned brittle  The kind where
you ransack your drawers Launching cannonballs of clothing into the air Clawing for that one joint you knew you misplaced once.  if time is queer and life is a journey,
if a hill is an obstacle and oceans make waves, if the tip of my nose turns red in the cold, a Garden is still a Garden. She takes care of Her Garden. |
