Sometimes I would walk through the halls,
feeling nothing but anxiety.
My mind would become flooded:
What should I be doing…
what should I be saying...
what is everyone thinking?

See-
I used to float to the back of the room
to the back of my mind where
I escaped the world by reading.
Nerdy.
A loser. A freak.
I was too intelligent for my age.
It wasn’t COOL to get straight A’s.

Then I advanced to the seventh grade,
with no idea my life was about to change.
I made a friend.
Then Two. Then Three.
A former unknown concept: “popularity”.

Skater shoes, with laces you didn’t tie,
pink backpacks, hair straight as a pin-
Abercrombie-
led me to a moment I still hate today:
“Try some of this”.
It wasn’t COOL if you said no.

It was my first taste of intoxication,
my first taste of escape-
escape of my mind, the thoughts,
The anxiety.
The more I sipped, the more I let go.

The drinks would become stronger,
we raged every other night.
Tolerances were creeping up high,
control started waving goodbye to my mind.
It wasn’t COOL to be sober.

We laughed, we kid-
called ourselves “alcoholics”.
If only then I knew more, and the future I would soon endure
because of the potion we poured and poured.
It wasn’t COOL to be a lightweight.

Some years later I bragged and I boasted,
over the amount of liquor I could intake.
“The only girl who could outdrink the boys”-
the girl, I’d someday unrelated.
She’d fallen for everything society had wanted to create.
“Popularity”.

Then came the day I knew would eventually arrive-
the day of realization and what it meant to be alive.
I no longer wanted to be COOL.

Because with each drink, the value of life was swallowed-
I never have felt
quite that hollow. As if
all the knowledge that once filled my mind
vanished.

I yearned for nothing but to go back to the days,
when I was uncool
and got
straight A’s.