She was a volcano waiting to erupt;
She was a hurricane barely kept off the shore.
And when she fell to the ground,
And shattered into a thousand shards of hurt,
They did not understand why
Because she had become so good at hiding.
They told her to keep it together
And she followed their orders well.
She kept her feelings hidden from the world.
And after a while, it became too hard,
So she started to keep her feelings from herself.
And after a while, she became confused.
She didn’t remember how to feel anything;
She didn’t remember if she could.
And everyone else thought she was fine.
They applauded how well they thought she was doing.
But they did not know what they had done.
They trapped her in a cage and bolted the gate,
Not caring if the rusty bars tore her flesh,
And she sank along the wall as she tried to catch
A gulp of air polluted by the words of others.
She listened as they chanted their rhymes
About stick and stones as she thought about
All her broken bones.
They didn’t understand why she was lonely
When a swarm of people came at her
From every side of her body.
But she felt like a whale in a school of clown fish.
They told her to be herself
But she knew deep down that
That was the last thing they wanted her to be.
She let them pour her into a mold
That they wanted everyone to fill,
But when she got worn out of being numb
She couldn’t remember how to feel.
She tried to feel something, anything,
Even if it was pain,
But she couldn’t remember how.
It had become too late.