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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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 Practice living in your own body
without feeling like a foreigner so that when the time comes you'll be able to fold into yourself like origami or maybe you could try leaving your body behind and sneak your soul under the carpet where most forgotten things reside.  I used to be afraid of scarring.
My mom always told me not to pick at my pimples because that would only leave scars in the future, when my acne subsided. What she meant was that even though my face was less-than-presentable now, I could save my future self from having a permanently below-average face, riddled with scars. She made it seem as if scarring was the worse thing that could happen, worse than my current state of acne—which had occupied both my cheeks, my forehead, and sometimes the tip of my nose, like it was the only the it wanted the world to see—because scarring was permanent. Because my future self would regret the mistakes my past self made. Because somehow, for some reason, my future self would be more fragile than my current self—and wouldn’t be able to bear having these scars on her face, even though my current self had to carry the weight of having more than 30 marks on her face that screamed “ugly” and “unworthy” to society.  I am a flower,
Trimmed, pampered, adorned, With only a glimpse of the world Through a thin glass window. I wonder, I yearn for, A life that’s less constricted, To be a wildflower that sees the ocean. But if I lived under the stars, Faced the cold harsh wind, Braved the frigid ocean waves, Would I wither? A Meeting With the Goddess Who Keeps Asking You to Save the World by Lara Eiffe (16, Ireland)*12/5/2020
 she finds you in the empty movie theatre, the hazy one that’s left you stumbling more than once.
“you can be more than a story locked away,” she says, face ghosting before yours like a moth pressed up against the inside of a lightbulb. there’s a shroud between these worlds, some barrier dividing the slurry of magic in hers from the fresh air of yours. you hum a pathetic note, something, (anything) to get her off your back. she always did turn to the heaven-scorched ones. “you could meet the end of the world and look it in the eye and smile.”  My love is beginning to fade,
leaving only traces of me lightly glistening. Pieces of me are already scattered, broken. I have fallen with the tiny orange leaves and been left desolate, grasping the wet marks on the ground created from abandoned footsteps and trapped sewage water. Long forgotten, invisible.  annie asks me, do i want to zoom tonight and i say no. annie says, okay, that’s fine. annie says, hope to see you next week then! annie says, we’ll miss you xx.
1. there’s a sad song playing in my head but there’s no music and the lyrics are taking the form of dull hammering against my forehead 2. it’s like, okay, i want to write but i’ve forgotten how 3. on tuesday night i’m planning to stand on the roof during the thunderstorm. i want to feel my shirt clinging to my skin and i want to drink from the clouds a. and i want to scream into the abyss like, do you think when nu wa made hands for humankind she knew that mine would feel empty all the time  My parents immigrated to the United States back in the 2000s. They originally grew up in the large city of Guangzhou. Every other summer, I would go visit for a couple months. My mother’s side lived in the rural areas, with breakfast carts on sidewalks and college students rushing to the local university my grandparents used to teach at. My father’s side, however, lived in the city and resided in one of the tallest buildings in Guangzhou. I would always love switching back and forth because the differences were so marvelous to me.
My dad moved here to the U.S. to attend University of Cincinnati and then Stanford University, and my mom followed. I spent my first birthday at Stanford with all my dad’s graduate classmates, and I watched him get his masters’ degree there. My mother, a very outspoken and passionate woman, stayed committal. She took care of me the entire time my dad was working on getting his education, and we soon moved to a city in Arizona after he got his degree.  [Content warning: obsessive-compulsive disorder, suicide]
My coworkers had become concerned about the number of times she would call me at work. Or maybe it was my strange replies that alarmed them. “I’m okay.” “I’ll drive slow.” “Yes, I’m okay.” Our house was clean and bright — not too bright but not too dull — just right. Two couches beside four bookshelves with twelve books on each row arranged in alphabetical order. Walls were adorned with photographs and paintings hung vertically, four frames dangling side by side. |
