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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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![]() Ten minutes on the balcony was always too short. Our colorful heads leaned against each other, mere naive creatures with poetry on our unwashed hands. Back inside, chairs were unbearable barriers so we pressed the metal legs together and whispered until we were the troublesome ones. The teens with the blue and pink hair
always talking out of turn, making time-lapses on my phone disguised by my dirty pencil case. I could watch those videos of us, of you, over and over until you were imprinted on my pupils, chuckling and tapping your chin preparing to tell me a joke. I could look at myself in the mirror and see you as a part of my irises. Maybe we laughed together too many times without smoke drifting from my lips and it got boring. You couldn’t handle how I felt safe with you when I wasn’t putting myself in danger. Boring. Collapsing on bed cushions, eclipsed by lights flashing around the corners of your room. Me, soaped in dog slobber, You, saying yeah to every sentence with a scarf of weed fumes around your neck. Some days I wonder how this was ever fun for me. It could have been that I felt alive when my blue curls wrapped around your pink hair like untamed ivy. Or that you and I are exactly what highschool looks like. Spikes around our necks and worn out boots stuffed with sand from beach bonfires. You were only excited by me when your mind was mixed with substances dragging you through parallelograms meiosis and mitosis slobbering on your scalp as blackberries, graffiti, and taxidermied mice laughed with you inside your head. I was never high enough for you. So of course it turned out this way. Of course I scribbled you out of my yearbook and my diary is tattooed with pen scratches each time I write about you. This isn’t creative writing anymore. We are no longer poetry, no longer the freaks in the story or the protagonists storming through highschool with an electric punk soundtrack. I suffocate myself in music when I see you. A distraction. My chair is across the room, and even though we never decided that this is how it is now I spend my ten minutes on the balcony and you don’t even come to class. Comments are closed.
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September 2023
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