Can you feel it?

Can you feel the pressure mounting?

The elephant sitting on your chest

Crushing you while you gasp for air, but there’s none to be found

Can you feel the poison slowly settling in to your veins?

Circulating through your pure and sober blood

While you reach inside yourself to try to drag it out

You cut yourself to see the blood flow and run your fingers through it looking for the venom

But you can’t find it

It’s a sick game of Where’s Waldo

It’s kind of funny isn’t?

How something as simple as a number

An evaluation

A label

Can push you over the edge

Can hold the gun to your head while the tears stream down your hot and red cheeks

You want to be free

You want to LIVE

But you can’t

It’s got you trapped

Chained and shackled in a dark room where all you crave is the light

Not food

Not water

Not love

But the light

The light of certainty

The light of positivity

The light of achievement

The light of success

When you look at that damned piece of paper and you define yourself by it

Your name is 90%

80

70

60

50

And then, your name is laughable

Your name gets you belittled

Ridiculed

Socially massacred

And for what?

Why? This is not your name

It is a mask

It hides your identity but not for positive reasons

It doesn’t hide you to protect the ones you love

It hides you to drive them away

The real

Fun

Beautiful you

Is gone

Your smile, glimmering like that of the Sun

It’s raw passion warming those that are in the cold

You give heat and light to those who have none

The mask keeps them cold and dark

Do not be the number you receive

For every question you answer correctly, one is answered right

Maybe not on the same piece of paper, but on another

And maybe not another, maybe it’s in the hallway

Maybe it’s the fight you broke up earlier in the day

Maybe it’s the elderly lady you helped cross the street

Maybe it’s the girl you told was beautiful, even though society says otherwise

Maybe it’s the cigarette you didn’t smoke

Maybe it’s the beer you didn’t have

You are more than a number

You are you

And you are beautiful