She wanted it to be different. She wanted to place the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that was not intended to fit, a way that would make people question if their puzzle was put together the way it was supposed to be, the way they were told it should be. She wanted to stand out from the norms that were set in front of her.

She wanted it to be different. She wanted to make hands tremble as she stood tall with radiating power. She wanted people to read her words and wonder why they ever thought things were okay to begin with, why people thought it mattered if someone was something other than what they believed they were to be. She wanted to be someone people would remember.

She said she was trying to find herself in words she could not mutter, words that drown her soul. She said “I can fix this” as she tried to erase the words she never wanted to have meaning, never wanted to make her feel like the world was pulling her at the seams. She wore her pink eraser down to a nub trying to dispose of pen ink that exposed what she thought of as “different.”

She said she found herself in the mistakes she made, in the words she never intended to write. She said her stories were supposed to be for other people to learn about themselves and instead made her learn that she is not what she thought she was. She said she hurt herself with stanzas that reminded her that her mind was not a fortress, that her thoughts were darker than she could ever imagine.

She controlled herself with the lines that she poured onto paper. She controlled every want, every thought, every action that could do harm to herself and others. She learned how to be kind and considerate. She learned how to love the parts of herself that she never knew existed.

She controlled her existence with the words she wrote, and with that control she learned how to exist.