Maybe by Astrid Gothard (15, Texas)

There’s an odd disconnect. You spend two years, no, more like seven, waiting for a sort of revelation. You can lie to yourself, tell yourself you’ve found it, maybe convince yourself it’s true. You’d like to think you know when you’re lying, but you know you’re never sure. There’s the subconscious, and then there’s the subconscious. They get mixed up and twisted together so easily that you begin to decide it’s just a matter of italics, like that means anything at all. It’s cold again, the key to unlocking all sorts of truths. Except the truths are in code, and you can only catch a few images, no significant meanings, until you decide nothing in your life has been interesting at all. But you think it has, only you don’t know. 

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People are more complicated then you’ve ever thought they could be. Good friends do bad things and other people tell truths that aren’t truths. You trust and trust and cry until you’ve got nothing left to give. Everyone looks at you with pity. You get a hug from a person who doesn’t quite care. Everyone moves on. You feel sick every time you think back. You’ve talked so much that the words begin to lose meaning. You wait and wait and spend quite a few months on your own until it all fades to gray. 

Things used to be brightly colored, fights that you didn’t know you fought until someone tells you that you’re a common denominator, and you need to change. You’re the pity, aren’t you. It’s everyone else's fault. If you believe it you tell yourself that you’ll fall apart. 

Except when your happy ending, the life-changing five days that make you smile so wide you hurt your face, ends, you think it’ll be perfect. You say it’ll be perfect. But six months pass, the memories fade, all your hope disappears, and the people you were counting on disappear into stories and smirks. 

And you tell yourself you’ll break but you don’t. You deal with it. You have a good friend, not a perfect friend but someone stoic, maybe exactly what you need. No-nonsense, a listener, but someone you value. For who they are. Not as what they are to you. And you suddenly (not so suddenly) realize that you’ve fallen into your own hole, that you’re exactly the person you think the world is full of, the people who make you want to kick something. 

You learn to be content. It’s not perfect or magical or anything. It’s fine. You’re fine. You learn. There are some truths that make you want to throw up but you can ignore them, fairly well. You catch yourself slipping up, and it makes you want to cry. But you’ve cried enough, and it never helps.

You’ve cried enough. 

There are broken parts. You’ve got a bitter streak. Now that the words stay trapped more of the time they find new outlets. Global circumstances mean that you’re trapped with an unwelcome buddy, who likes to turn things on their head. Things explode randomly. You try to cross an irrigation ditch with a pumpkin and end up getting blood everywhere, sort of everywhere, and shattering the other pumpkin, leaving it in the ditch, out of sight of your embarrassment, to rot. You scream. You get throw a wooden spoon at the wall, and it shatters, and so many memories get tossed into the garbage, rendered useless, because you can’t figure it out. Everything’s an odd shade of blank. 

And then, like a step through a door and a flip of a light switch, things change. Little things come first. The spoon is replaced. New pumpkins grow. People come and go. You don’t notice the revelation, all around you, until you’re there, one year later, and the world around you is something else entirely. And maybe, maybe, maybe. You learn new halls and new people. New words and new colors. New truths and new whispers. The walls of your room are painted over, blankets are swapped out, and suddenly you’re a part of a new narrative. The countdown starts, four year until. Until you set off on your own and learn to live that way. But for now, it’s all about the small steps. 
It’s cold again. You can leave your windows open. The breeze ruffles your hair. And sure, there are the broken parts. There will always be the broken parts. Both subconscious and subconscious cling to them. It’s always part of the story. But a box of new shoes shows up on the doorstop one day, and maybe that’s a moment that changes you. One step after the other. 

As the months flip by, little things happen, and the colors begin to fill in. A book. A few words. A few friends. Smiles and laughs. Hopes and wishes. Someone else’s hand in yours. One day, you look up, and the colors around you feels true. Scary and blinding and wild, but so beautiful it knocks the breath out of you. Right here, right now, no barriers between you and the true, crazy wonder of the world. This is something brighter than content and fine. And maybe, maybe, maybe this is joy. ​