The orange and blue flames of candlelight memories from birthdays come and gone illuminate brown stains from spilt ink and paper cuts on your family's hardwood desk.
The soft mahogany that carried the weight of library books with cracked bindings, that weathered broken glass, finger scratches and runny noses.
The writing table that saw crayons and watercolors fade into pen and ink and now your old pencil with the grooves worn down right where you're used to so you can hold it without cramps as you scrawl through notebook after notebook and bite your tongue.

You can't let the heat of words burn inside your throat as you sew your mouth shut with the red thread your mom used to patch your overalls with in fifth grade.
The sagging brown and blue jeans with baby yellow fabric covering that rip in the knee where the neighborhood boys pulled your ponytails and knocked you down.
When you felt your palms scrape against the concrete and you were finally enlightened to the fact that they don't tease because they like you, but because they like to see you in pain.

Never forget that morning when that pain finally ****** you off enough that when you rode your purple “girls bike” up to the rack before saying bye to your daddy you purposefully ran your back tire over a puddle to splash the group's new ninja turtle shoes.
The sneakers your neighbor had and you were jealous of because you wear a dress and he wouldn't let you borrow because they weren't gonna match, no matter if you were trying to climb the fence in his backyard and your bare feet got scraped in the end.
The stinging of the metal matches the stinging in your palms from being tripped and the stinging in your fingertips from the days of paper cuts from making collages on that old wood desk and you write.

You write loud enough that the scratching of your graphite on paper echoes around the room and you drown out slamming doors and harsh conversations.
Your fingers are as quick as the automatic whisk that you always turned up to high when your mommy would turn around, just so you could watch the cookie batter get just… too… close… to the edge of the bowl before shutting it off in the nick of time.
In a split second moment your lead breaks and you stare blankly at the scribbled mangled words that travel in circles around your book.

And the embarrassment and anger and understanding that this world's filled with ******* wells up behind your blank eyes and bubbles in between your teeth, seeping through the red thread.
It dribbles down your chin and creates a pool atop of the grey words the clear saliva of sadness eats away at the paper and wood like acid.
Imagine what it was doing to your stomach, but don't think too much about it, just pick up the safety scissors and ignore the ocean inside.

Those scissors aren't just for paper snowflakes anymore, they're not plastic in pretty colors, no now they're heavy and metal and cold in your hands.
They're built for adults, for greying and melting faces, for the weight of a world that ignores beautiful broken bottles on the sidewalk and walks by a cute cat,
Or says “It's Just A Girl Thing.”
Or “Boys Will Be Boys.”
And they make you wish you were back blowing bubbles in your treehouse as you sneak a juice box and pretending you're the  captain of a pirate ship.
Instead of sitting at this desk with a broken pencil and dripping face.