This poem is a story about me. I'm writing it at 4:30 AM because I can't sleep and it's better than smoking cigarettes.

I'm 19. Male, half korean, half American mutt. For some reason, I have this photographic memory. I remember too things like they just happened yesterday. I get flashbacks to events I shouldn't remember. Things I shouldn't think about. Other memories never get past the tip of my tongue. I have PTSD with the dumbest triggers you could imagine. I live every day on the edge with pent-up feelings even though I tell people I do not feel. It's hard to make me laugh, and it's hard to make me cry, and I feel awfully lonely.

I remember elementary school. Age 5... I'll remember the first day I rode a school bus for the rest of my life. I think at least 8 kids asked me if I was Chinese on my walk to the back, and some disgustingly fat kid across the aisle was begging people for paper scraps to shoot spitballs at "the *****". The next 13 years weren't much easier than that day. As I grew up, I found it necessary to grow my wit. I disguised my sorry feelings behind clever jokes while people began to like me. I made some friends, but I felt so alone. I always felt like nobody liked me when it was probably only me that didn't like me.

Senior year of high school, I fell in love with a girl, and this is a really long story too except that I can sum it up that I just ruined her life and now she won't talk to me. But she was the sunrise to what had been a dark, dark life. She was my safety and my warmth. It wasn't about how cute she was or what she looked like. I fell in love with the person inside of her. We did some stupid things, disobeyed her parents. Her parents then damaged me for loving her... and I made mistakes I'll forever regret. I never meant to hurt her, but ... Everything I did to her - and what she's done to me, the guilt I put on myself before she ever left and the pain that she brought on me after she did... I cried to myself for 200 straight days and even though my friends have picked me up, it still makes me feel like the most pathetic being on this planet and I'm sure just like she knows now not to waste any her time on a waste of human life, that was nothing without her.