What’s the greatest lesson we should learn?

That we can do whatever we set our minds to.

We can go the great distance,

That extra mile.

It was the world that convinced us that we could not.

– Rule number 1.

We are like matches:

Under certain circumstances,

Someone can light us up,

And we begin to burn

Until we’re nothing but

Ashes.

– Burn

Honey,

Just remember that nothing is permanent,

And that sometimes that acts as a blessing and curse.

Darling,

All I’m saying is look both ways before knowing what’s coming next.

Sweetheart,

Maybe you should listen.  

–What the old lady down the street used to say.

Hollow

We see a girl in an empty room. As the camera zooms in closer, we see that she’s peacefully sleeping in an almost perfect position: It seems as though her breathing intervals are nearly untraceable but, alas, we see her ribs slowly rise and fall. The camera quickly zooms out and we see a near to empty room: No windows, no doors, everything painted in pale-white. We see that this girl is almost trapped in this small-contraption-like room.

We hear an alarm ringing, and the girl stiffly awakens. As she climbs out of bed, we see her movements are almost robotic; too calculated. Her eyes never seem to close; she’s not blinking. The camera follows her and we see her daily activities: We’re intruders in this place, and we’re merely waiting for chaos to strike. We notice that the girl’s hair is tied back, her back bare, as the white hospital gown enwraps her. We see her slowly move to her night table, and we further observe that she’s taken out her small contraption. She sits on her bed and begins to tap away on the device: The small block glowing different colors with each tap.

The camera zooms out and we avert our eyes to see the room as a whole: It’s nothing but a box, and once again we realize that there is no way this girl can get out of the room. The realization hits us, each second is filled with suspense as we see her continue to tap away. Each second we realize that she’s trapped. We begin to tell her to get out of the room, to find a way to escape, that there’s no way out: She doesn’t respond.

We begin to yell and scream and just when we’ve lost all hope and begin to sink back into our seats, we see a miracle happen: She quickly turns her head upwards, towards us. The cameras zooms into her face and we come face-to-face with her. For the first time we notice her blink, we notice her take in a deep breath, shock and fear spreads through her eyes; we notice she’s human. We realize that she noticed us, that she heard us: We have hope and quickly adjust ourselves to sit on the verge of our seats, wanting to tell her something more.

Then, we see nothing but pitch black: We realize that the darkness took one more.

Yes,

It is possible

To see and still be blind,

Look at us;

We do it

Everyday.

– Blinded

We hear her call out a name:

But, it sounds too foreign for us to decipher what it is.

We don’t know who she is,

But we suddenly see her controlling a puppet.

We soon realize that the puppet somehow looks like us:

Behaves just as we do.

Although,

The puppet’s movements are robotic,

And its head is tucked down,

Hypnotized by the screen that glows in its face.

It’s head abruptly looks towards us,

And we see our reflection,

Staring back at us.

– Mirror Image

She wasn’t just a girl,

She never could be just a girl.

She was like the ocean:

Peaceful, rocked slowly back and forth, and was calm.

And yet,

She was just as dangerous,

Just as mysterious.

She was deeper than the ocean;

She held more depths,

More secrets under what we could ever see.

And although she held the ocean at her core,

Her eyes held fire,

Setting everything ablaze in the deepest parts of her mind.

Yet no one knew what was in her.

Her heart was broken into pieces,

As if someone broke a vase

And did a horrible job in gluing it back together.

She was no ordinary girl,

And she was the girl who everyone would talk about

In a few hours.

It almost seemed as if she was too broken:

The fire that was ablaze

Didn’t match the calm waves of the ocean.

The depth that she carried

Could be held no longer.

She was alone,

So very alone.

So we heard that she jumped

Into the flames that she held,

And into the ocean that drowned her.

We heard that she wanted to save herself

So she could finally be seen.

– Her own depths

And we soon came to realize that

She couldn’t hold the world’s borders any longer.  

– Her own depths, part 2

They were stems

That tried to blossom.

She was supposed to be the brilliant mind,

He was supposed to discover something huge,

They were supposed to cross paths.

But,

Instead they became oppressed by the walls that blocked their view,

By the glowing screens that emptied their vision.

And maybe one day,

They’ll blossom again,

     But for now,

They’re seen as nothing but a small hole implanted into our ground.

– Lilacs and Roses

Listen to me.

“Doctor.”

We hear the words come out of her as if she were about to break at any moment. Her voice the sound of a sweet record that was played for too long, and broke. The doctor looked at her, sighed, further adjusted her glasses, got out a new pen and nodded towards her.

She begins to speak, although we can’t quite hear what she’s saying anymore, we see her then pause as if to clear her mind: Almost smiled just then, nearly stopped herself from speaking but, this time, she doesn’t. With her head down, hands in her lap, we see her lips move, her eyes staring down at her fingers, as though she weren’t controlling them.

We see her speaking, but we can’t hear what she’s saying anymore, it’s as if we’ve become deaf to the situation that sits before us. Although we can’t hear, we definitely see her lips move, but as she slows down, we realize that there is one word we recognize, “help.”  

She looks up again, and sees the doctor looking down, clicking something behind her clipboard. She slowly bends over and places her fingers just enough so she’s able to bring it down and see what’s going behind it. She sees her doctor tapping away at her phone, giggling at a random photo that she’s found online.

With tears in her eyes, she nods to the doctor, stands up, and slowly walks away. With her head down, she can only muster up one solution to get everyone’s attention – so she could finally be heard.

I’m Sorry You Weren’t Heard

Dear sister,

I wish you knew how much you meant to me,

How much I wish you were here with me.

For the one thing we never had, was time.

I wish I got to you in time,

I wish I told you to not sink into society’s standards.

I wish I paid more attention to you when you were here,

Everyone misses you,

I miss you the most though.

I wish you stayed longer.

But most of all,

I wish you didn’t feel

Trapped

I wish you didn’t feel suffocated to the point where you couldn’t say,

“I need help.”

So you could get the chance you never got.

Looking back at her reflection

She’s still the girl who got called fat.

She’s still the girl who got pushed away,

The one whose needs were always placed at the bottom of the ocean.

She’s still the girl who she didn’t want to be.

She looks in the mirror,

Bones can be seen popping out,

Her skeleton showing,

Eye sockets sunken so deep,

No one would be able to reach for them.

Her veins show,

Her yellow paleness stares back at her.

She stares at the ghost that stands before her.

She gets onto the scale,

Slowly looks down,

And there it is,

That number that she’s always wanted to be:

85 pounds,

      Not one pound more,

  Not one pound less.

She looks at the printed picture of the model

that hangs from her bathroom mirror.

We see her get off the scale,

We see tears streaming down her cheek,

Then, ever so quietly,

With quiet sobs in between we hear her whisper to herself,

   “I did it.”

– Broken Bones

We don’t realize it;

We don’t realize the moment until it’s over.

Gone,

Only a slight memory that disintegrates within time.

That’s how she felt:

Lost.

Gone.

Broken.

But, something inside of her lit up

When she realized

That she could break the borders

That entrapped her in her own mind.

Something made her see

That she could break the walls from within.

That she wasn’t just another prototype,

That she was something more.

She figured out.

And although it took her years,

her voice was heard.

–Escape.

The words left her with scars

That traced every inch of her skin:

It entrapped her to the point

Where she forgot how to breathe.

– Suffocated

What are we?

We’ve reduced our texts to one letter words,

Our K’s and lol’s and lmao’s

simply meaning

more.

Can’t you see it in our eyes?

We’re different:

Society tells us to do this,

      We do it.

Society tells us to do that,

      We do it.

So,

We’ve done it.

We’ve finally done it:

We’ve cracked under its system,

Broken from the standards

That we’ve made.

We’ve destroyed

Ourselves in the making.

We wish that the word serendipity could define us,

Yet it doesn’t.

Maybe,

The opposite of serendipity defines us.

Yet,

    Why would we want to have a word define us?

We’re a whole book that has yet to be written.

– Broken Pieces

Silence lured through the room:

It was the loudest silence they would ever experience.

Then, they hear three bangs,

And it ringed through their ears.

But, they were soon left with the beating of

Their hearts,

Pounding through their chests.

– Bang, Bang.

There’s a difference between want and need:

You want to have a new phone,

So you can be “cool” and fit in.

You need a book

To delve into a place that you have yet to discover.

– Differences

As we look at our glowing screens,

We see our world set ablaze:

Red sparks flicker

And the thick, grey smoke rises,

As we see our beloved home

Torn to the ground.

– Irreversible

We stand

On the ground that is filled with

Chaos:

It rumbles beneath our feet,

And the sky shakes with us.

Yet,

We need to stand in unison:

In a harmonious tone.

So we can make the chaos

subside.

So the ones after us

Can see further.

– Legacy

Run

We see a small girl, sitting alone in her room: It almost seems as if she’s sobbing in a corner. We hear her soft cries and gasps of breath from time to time, we see her shoulders shake in rhythm to the sounds she makes. We move closer towards her and we realize that she’s no more than eight.

“What’s wrong, little one,” we ask, not only out of curiosity, but for the most part, out of fright. Although we’ll leave in a moment, we know that chaos will soon strike. For now though, we watch and observe, as though this won’t affect us.

We avert our eyes to the small girl, we see her slowly move her head in an upward direction.

“They’re coming for me,” she says, ever so quietly, as if to not awaken the monster lurking outside the room. The camera shakes a little, and we lose focus of the little girl for a split second. As the camera reverts to its normal position, we see that something has changed.

“Don’t worry, help is on the way,” we hear from two shadows that we see have appeared on our screens. We zoom out, and see that the shadows have swiftly made their way out the room and walked away from the girl, and from the building that the girl was in. As we follow the shadows, we notice what they’ve given the child, what we’ve let happen to the child: The little girl was now filled with false hope.

The world was a canvas that was painted in beautifully extravagant colors,

But they were blinded

By the screens that blocked

Their view.

– Picture Perfect

I was taught to write on wet sand,

That soaked my feet,

And brought shells to the shore.

I was taught to climb the tallest mountains,

And sour the sky.

I was taught to feel the warmth of the fire,

That made the long winter nights less cold.

With this, I learnt what life meant,

I can muster it up all in one sentence:

The borders we built are reconstructed by the dreams we live through.

– Lessons.

We live in a world

Where we’re allowed to have a voice,

And although it’s difficult to be heard,

It’s not impossible.

We live in a world

Where there are more wars than peace

And yet it is called the most peaceful time in history.

We live in a world

Where technology can feel emotions,

Where it can track us down anywhere, at any time,

Where we can refuge in glowing screens.

We live in a world

Where our seas drown in plastic.

We live in a world

Where we confuse hatred and love.

We live in a world

That we’ve created,

That we’ve initiated,

That we’ve made.

Who’s to say we can’t change our world?

We live in an imperfect world,

Where we have the right

To change it for the better.

–Imperfection.

We need to move on

From the boundaries

We’ve built.

– The final rule