I've spent what feels like a lifetime
trying to ease my way into an English world.
The world of Chaucer and Eliot
and vocabulary only Merriam-Webster knew.

I declared a major.
I don’t know if it really matters anymore,
because when it’s dark
and the campus is empty
all I can feel are the forgotten words floating overhead like stars,
whispering for me to go home,
rectify the official white papers.
Become something else;
become anything but this.

Become who?
Someone who can’t feel anything
but the weight of the leaves
as they crunch under the lilt of their laugh?
Or the one who cries outside their advisor’s office,
because they read something so beautiful
yet still so small,
an unshared treasure?

Why write? Why speak?
I don’t know the answers to either.
Because when you are writing, you are speaking,
and one is almost as good as the other.

But when the words get caught in the back of your throat
and your feet are blocks of concrete,
unable to move
or think
or feel —
Is writing any better?
Will writing save the invisible,
or the insignificant
or the unheard?
The ones who disappear?

I've spent what feels like a lifetime,
trying to force my face into the light
and take a major that isn’t really mine,
dashing off poorly executed poems and flash fiction,
grasping for something that might work.
But in the end it’s nothing
and I am still just as
lost.