⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm, suicide, and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization⚠️
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Tenth grade:

I am standing in the foyer
with my friends
before the bell rings.

From my sailor's mouth:
a bluster of salt and curse words.

My friends are so used
to hearing me swear,
that I believe they have become
desensitized to the variations of "****"
that whistle through my teeth.

Today, I use a
word
I have never said in front of them before.

Their eyes flash
with holier-than-thou
disapproval.

I understand how my language
may be construed as being offensive.

And, truly, I mean no harm.

But truly,
does that make me less than?

(Maybe it does.)

I've never been like them.

I am not pristine.

I am all edge.

Cut from sea glass,
composed of atoms having split
and drowned in their
self-perpetuated monsoons.  

My voice is not a siren song.

It is the stuff
of brine and hurricane.

I ask:
are you mad at me?

"I mean--I don't like hearing it..."

(Yes.)

"It's just sort of disrespectful."

(So you are mad at me.)

This type of shame
can only be alleviated
through means of punishment.

During English class,
I go to the bathroom.

Into my left forearm,
I carve the word
*****,
its lines written
in barbed-wire cursive.
Like a trigger-happy Etch A Sketch,
I create haphazardly.

When I get home that evening,
my parents, having received a phone call
from the school that afternoon,
tell me we are going to the hospital.

(Clarification:
I am going to the hospital,
they are only taking me there.)

Post phone call,
my father had contacted
Alberta Health Services.
The representative he had spoken to
told him that it was necessary
that I go to the hospital
and that if I didn't comply,
he should call 911,
wherein the paramedics
would take me by force.

I am in awe that
this stranger has the power
to tell me where I must go
before I am even aware
of their existence.

After screaming
and sobbing
and swearing--
one of the words being
the cuss that initiated
this series of events
in the first place--
I finally surrender.

On the ride to the hospital,
I listen to "A Car, a Torch, a Death"
by Twenty One Pilots.

"The air begins to feel a little thin
As I start the car, and then I begin
To add the miles piled up behind me
I barely feel a smile deep inside me
And I begin to envy the headlights driving south
I want to crack the door so I can just fall out"


I cinch the vinyl of the seatbelt
between my fingers the entire way there.
Because, in this instance,
the seatbelt is my enemy
so I keep her closer
to me than my own skin.

(But I am not sure
if I really did this
or if my emotion
exploits my memory.)

We arrive.

Still hysterical,
I grab a fistful of snow
before we pass through the doors.

A guffaw verging on maniacal
escapes from my chapped lips:

What if this is my
last chance
to touch snow,
to inhale the crispness of November
before I am locked up?

(What if they lock me up?)

I step out of the queue
and into the nurse's station.
My parents explain
what I've done to myself
and the nurse asks me how I feel.

"Angry,"
I say.

"Why are you angry?"

"Because I've been brought here against my will."

When the ER doctor
has finished her interrogation,
she says that a psychologist
will be with me shortly.

"I'm going to do homework while I wait,"
I tell her, defiance tugging at my vocal cords,
"Because I AM going to school tomorrow."

I ******* my way through
the rest of my assessment
with the psychologist,
try to sound the least suicidal as possible
while also making it exponentially clear
that admitting me involuntarily--
isolating me from the rest of society--
would only intensify my depression.

They let me go.

One of the doctors--
or maybe it was a nurse--
makes a comment
that I can't fully remember.

All I know is that I reply:
"No, I'm still pretty ******,"
to which the doctor (nurse?)
tells me that my parents did the right thing
and that my anger is unwarranted.

And I am just so ******* exhausted
with these people who treat me
like I'm some backward,
music box ballerina.

I figure eight in the direction
opposite of the world
spinning on its axis.

They do not like
this backward girl--
this warped record
whose lyrics seem unfathomable.

So they close
the top of the music box
and I no longer play
the leading role of my own life--
I am just some small, porcelain thing
collecting dust in the fissures of her
silence.