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On the last day of school I paused by the table of books outside the English classroom. I sorted through the pile with increasing urgency as the passing period drew to a close. Finally, with one minute left, I saw something I wanted. The Grapes of Wrath. Smiling, I pulled it from the pile, only to find that it had been torn apart. The front cover missing, the first few pages shredded.

It slunk into her heart one night, as she was lying awake staring at the shapes the trees made outside her window. That night she began to feel different for the first time, though she didn’t know why. That night she started to realize that she was lonely.
Emotion undetected.

If I could meld my thoughts together, into a mosaic of pictures and thoughts and sounds, would they form a shape? What kind of form would a reflection of my mind take on?

You say you think you could be everyone.
The truth is, you don’t think you can be anyone.
The taste of soap is in my mouth, bubbles in my hair. Every time I catch that scent, I remember those words.

“Whatever it is, it should help you to get some leverage over him.” She stared me straight in the eye. “Got it?”
I nodded, glancing away. Everything in my appearance was the picture of compliance. But inside, I was seething. What right did she have to determine people’s lives?

You are all bleeding, pinching the cut to hasten the red, and you hold up your paper cut to the world and cry as if your throat has just been sliced open.

A prison.
We’re all slaves, aren’t we? Humans are so stupid, convincing themselves that the most primal of their desires are something complicated and immeasurable.
You don’t realize it. But you’re bending yourself to fit this choking cage, too.

My speech is clumsy. Words tumble over one another, scramble to get out and fall, stepped on and pushed down by each other until they make no sense at all. They think they can make it out of my mouth same as my words make it out through my fingers, at the speed of messy handwriting in blue ink, the speed of fingers typing frantically across a keyboard. But they’re wrong. Speech and writing are not the same. Because no matter how clumsily the words fill the page, no matter how many times I make typos and have to press the backspace key, the words themselves are what matter. The words themselves are graceful, and it doesn’t matter how clumsily they appear.

To cry. An outpouring of human emotion, a tight feeling in the chest that can only be relieved through salty tears rushing over the skin. So many times we feel dead inside, we feel nothing; we force ourselves to laugh, to smile, to say words we don’t believe. Sometimes we lie so much about these emotions that we start to believe them ourselves. Can’t even tell when we really feel something and when we don’t. But crying–no one wants to cry. They use all their might to keep the tears inside, and when they come, they have no choice. The truest show of emotion, the truest way to show what is inside.

Promise me you’re not going to do anything. Promise me you’ll leave things as they are, don’t dare to change, just never say anything and always stay silent. Promise me you’ll keep it locked up, no matter how much you think it hurts right now, because you’ll be grateful for it at some point later. Promise me you won’t do it,
said the little heart-stopping voice for the ninety-ninth time this day.