I used to be somebody…


No, that’s not some cheesy, cliche line I pulled out of my *** for the sake of this poem.
Simply put, it’s the story of my English teacher asking me to read for the part of a character named “somebody” in To **** a Mockingbird, and later taking my script and giving it to someone else.
You can imagine how betrayed I felt.
I told her, “I’m gonna write a poem about this, and you’ll regret it!”
She didn’t hear me of course, but here we are nonetheless.

Fact is, I cared about somebody.
This is amusing to me because Harper Lee used “somebody” as a placeholder pronoun for a faceless, meaningless character who says one line on page 245, yet it meant so much to me.
I thought about how we humans often say, “I want to be somebody,” as if making your name known equals making your life meaningful.
The irony in this is that we’ll look at a stranger, someone nameless and meaningless to us as just somebody.


There’s a lesson to be learned from all this: everything is temporary.
Like a leaf that blooms in the springtime just to float to the ground when autumn comes,
or a ***** drawn on a bathroom stall just to be covered by a fresh layer of paint for the next prepubescent boy to leave his mark.
Even people are temporary.
We all have different needs, and tend to follow who or what those needs are.
Some spend their lives searching for a place where they feel needed.
Evidence of this can be seen in those instances where one person doesn’t need the other anymore, and the other is left to wonder what they did wrong.

This, my friends, is why when you ask someone about love, they’ll tell you about heartbreak.

Because hundreds of people may sit on a park bench on any given day, but none of them will notice the fading initials carved inside a heart on its side.
None of them will feel the meaning it once had.
They won't wonder if it ever held meaning at all.

Maybe both lovers cared about each other more than life, and they held hands while one of them carved their mark and smiled wide at the immortality of their love.
Maybe only one of them cared, and to the other, this gesture of a knife to old wood felt like nothing but pointless vandalism.
Maybe, just maybe, it held no meaning to either of them, and they hoped that a public display of their relationship would somehow save it from falling apart.

And where are they now?
Are they still head over heels for each other, naked in bed, pretzeled together while crisp Spring air filters in on a quiet Sunday morning?
Or do they each occasionally visit that park bench alone, running a finger over the indentation in the wood and remembering the Great Used To Be?

You may think all of this is a very cynical way of thinking, and you’d be correct.
But, I think I write because I’m answering the questions no one bothers to ask.
Whether my answers hold meaning to anyone,
or my writing somehow makes me “somebody,”
that’s not up to me.

Besides, it’s all temporary.

Let’s all go back to before we were broken.
Before love turned to lie,
Before lie turned to die,
Before die turned to live.
I would rather die today than live another day of this death.

My voodoo doll is being held by a God I don’t believe in and he’s picking at my mind with a needle,
Injecting my brain with a chemical imbalance that makes it so it doesn’t matter whether my eyes are open or closed,
I always see the same darkness.

I didn't really begin to notice until I began to notice that people were beginning to notice.
This is truly,
the most stubborn nothing I have ever not felt.

In seventh grade,
my best friend fell asleep to lullabies sung by a blade that she never seemed to remember the next morning.
She didn't talk about her feelings much,
but when she did she said it seemed like I was the only one who remembered the next morning,
and I did.
After I got her help,
she called me her savior.
I never really understood how much that meant.
I told myself I would never feel pain the way she did.

In grade eight, my other best friend's sister swallowed a bottle of pills,
searching for an end.
After she returned from two weeks in a mental institution,
telling the story of a girl who called out names without faces,
the story of a little boy who had voices inside his head telling him to **** his own parents,
I tried my hardest not to think she was just as crazy as he.
I told myself I would never feel pain the way she did.

You see,
in the end,
everyone turns out to be the person they'd sworn they'd never become.

Because now,
the hiss of silver splitting skin whispers in my ear and sings me to sleep.
I've held bottles of pills in my hands,
searching for an end.

I don't know what to do,
because the end everyone seems to want me to have is monumental,
and very far away.

What do you do,
when your misery has become a reflection on a window?
Transparent, but clear,
if you only try hard enough to see it.
No one has tried hard enough to see it.

I've mastered the art of forgetting.
On the good days,
I can't seem to remember what happiness feels like the next morning,
and I start to feel pain the way they did.

I've started,
thinking outside of the lines my life is written in,
so I know what the dead know.
People lie to themselves about death.
Don't truly accept that it's going to happen until it happens.
And yet, they believe in a white light and a golden gate.

Let me tell you,
death is not beautiful.

If it truly was,
you would want to die just as much as me.

I once had a dog.
A beautiful golden retriever that was given to my mother from my father during the holidays of 1999.
Less than two months later,
I was born.
Five weeks premature.

You see, I've always been great at doing things early.
I first spoke at age one, but only to my mother.
Grew ******* in grade five, but wore bras so tight that they flattened my chest.
Had a college reading level by the time I reached sixth grade.
I swear,
I had my mid-life crisis at ten years old.

It was springtime.
The smell of Michigan's cool air mingled with that of melted snow on pavement and the first songbirds of the season called for the buds to bloom.
I was twelve years old.
I returned home one evening to find the dog with the golden-white fur,
She who would race me down the field when I thought I could join a travel soccer team after spectating one single practice,
She who would race my mother back and forth through the water back when my mother was happy,
The dog who was barely four months older,
who had seen through every unripe experience by my side,
The dog was gone.
And all I did was smile.

Now, I realize how twisted that must sound,
but you just don't get it.
I had learned a long time before to expect to one day return and find no one by my side.

You see, I've always been great at predicting things early.

I was five years old and it was springtime,
but the harmonies screamed from my parents' mouths at each other drowned out the songbirds' melodies to the budding trees.
And I,
in all the glory of innocent intelligence,
asked my mother to promise me that nothing would happen to our family.
Three years later came the separation,
and four years after they decided to love each other again,
came the divorce.

Promises,
no matter how concrete,
seem to have this strange habit of being broken, don't they?

Maybe it runs in the family.
Being left, that is.

When the first person I loved left me,
I thought it was for the best.
When the second person I loved left me,
I got over it.
When the third person I loved left,
I was lost before I was found.
But one year ago,
when the person who found me left,
the one person who I never thought I’d lose...
I don't think I will ever heal.

Life, it seems,
is even more cruel than a promise.
It's so loud in my mind that I don't know what voice is mine anymore,
but being forced to watch as the few people I let myself care about inch toward being as miserable as me is so much more unbearable.
It's starting to feel like springtime,
and normally that would make me happy, but the puddles that are melting from the snow drifts are my tears,
and the smell of the season changing only reminds me how easy winter makes it to be sad.
Every time I feel as though I have finally reached rock bottom,
rock bottom splits with my skin and lets me fall deeper.

I don't understand how things can just keep getting worse
How every door I open does not lead to a new beginning, but to a new end.
I'm great at math,
but how do I solve the equation when happiness equals pain but pain does not equal happiness.
I live a life where I keep myself lonely out of fear of being lonely.
I spend my days making time to play with words and playing with time to make words.
I want to choose death because I can't handle the hurt, but I choose life because the only thing worse than being hurt is doing the hurting.
I'm tearing myself apart in every way possible and you don't understand how quickly I'd end it if I could.


But Band-Aids can't fix bullet holes.
So don't be surprised when you can't wake me up one day.

You see,
I've always been great at ending things early.

They tell us to break the mold,
but sometimes the mold is too big to begin with.

Think outside of the box, they say,
expecting us to know how unique we must be to do so.

They tell us that the sky is the limit,
and then say to push the limits.

Us teenagers,
we're supposed to be invincible.
Right?

Plastered everywhere are the words,
"You must love yourself before anyone else can love you."

And that's why we're doomed.

Because self-loathing has poisoned all of us,
and for some,
that's what keeps them trying so hard to fit the mold.

Sometimes "the box" is the safest place to curl up and cry in.

Our insecurities are what keep us grounded,
unable to reach the stars.

So thank you,
society.
Because the standards you have set are bigger than the standards you have actually set.

And that's why we're doomed.

She walked her plank.
She was still afraid to drown as her great withered ship sank.
The sea whispered softly as salt water mixed with tears,
Darling, don’t be nervous,
We’re the perfect pair,
You’re welcome here.

She looked up from the water that licked at her feet,
And saw the boy that she loved as their tortured eyes did meet.

His hair ran rampant and blood pooled from his wrists,
And yet he still smiled and blew her a kiss.
“Come on, love,
Don’t look so blue.
I may be dying,
But I’m dying with you.”

She couldn’t help but giggle,
As music screamed in her ears.
She never liked heavy metal,
But it seemed like what a person committing suicide would hear.

She sunk further into the bathtub that was a vast sea,
As more of his blood stained the tile once pristine.
They shared silent nostalgia of a love so traumatic.
Who knew a ****** bathroom floor could be so romantic?

As water enveloped the tip of her nose,
Over her face floated the petal of a rose.
And that was the death bed in which she would lay,
Until someone stumbled upon her shipwreck someday.

Her ship ****** her down into a dark aether,
And the plank that held her last step sank down with her.
As her last breath bubbled up from below,
The love of her life whispered death a “Hello.”

The most beautiful love is created through the most horrendous pain,
Now only the story of two will remain.

They went for a midnight swim.
The moonlight glinted off of the ripples in the water like a billion stars,
their bodies flowed together like their own current.
He was infinite; the night gave him an energy that he’d never felt before.
She was an anchor, weighed down by the clothes that soaked in the water and clung to her like a second skin.
No matter how safe and comforting his arms were,
the voice in the back of her head screamed that all anchors sink.

His fingers braided her flowing brunette hair under the water.
He said it felt so soft that it almost wasn’t there,
but it was just there enough for him to never want his hands to leave the cloud-like wisps of brown.

So they sat by the shoreline
and he twisted locks of her hair between *******,
the sky stars and the lake stars throwing their light into battle.
They kissed with a love that only one of them wanted,
His hand resting on the nape of her neck and fingertips stroking the hairs at the base of her skull.
Their lips moved in sync,
but her body laid stiff.
She shivered when his fingers pulled and twisted gently between strands.

The voice in the back of her head spoke up again;
warning her of what would happen if he tugged just a little too hard.

Would he become the other boy?

The other boy
who treated her pale skin as a canvas.
Who painted only in shades of black and blue,
his fists were his only paintbrushes.
The boy who grabbed her arm,
dug his nails into her skin,
shoved his tongue down her throat as sharp as a dagger.
This boy told her she was beautiful.
Called her a work of modern art.
A masterpiece.

His masterpiece.



In an instant,
him with his lips pressed to hers,
whose arms felt like home
and whose eyes gleamed with all the wonderful things the world had to offer…

He looked like the other boy.

His smile,
warm and inviting,
now twisted into a wicked grin in her mind.
Each slight tug of hair felt to her like she was being scalped;
Like his hand would disappear into the locks and emerge with a thousand strands in his palm,
torn out by the roots.
She was bleeding from the head,
bleeding from the heart...



With each current lover that would someday become a part of the past,
she saw him.
Their hands would trail over parts of her that were once bruised and broken
and she would only feel his fingers pressing into her skin.
Her love was forever a tribute to the other boy,
for he was the artisan,
and she was his canvas.
He signed his craftsman’s signature on her heart in permanent ink,
and forever
she would be his masterpiece.