Four Journals: A Poem

There are four filled journals scattered across the table in front of me.
I sit cross-legged in an over-sized t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts,
With my eyes ready and the journals waiting
The first one, with masking tape
And a name etched across in permanent marker.
I open to the first page, and read a nine-year-old girl’s words.

“In my room. Door shut, bolted, sealed, glued. Eyelids pressed shut
Tightly gripping a teddy bear in cracked, bleeding hands.
Chewing my bottom lip with tears leaking down my pale face.
They nearly freeze on my cheeks like icicles—
As though I’m back, trapped in a dungeon, in a closet, in my parent’s cold, cold kitchen.
Screams beckon—I bury my face in a blanket and sob.
Footsteps burn the stairs as they make their way to my attic bedroom.
I am frozen. I am alone.”

Memories of looking in the mirror leave me cold and empty—a face I do not recognize as I shut the journal and hear nothing but silence.
How is it that a young girl can sit and cry alone in her room with no one to quell her fears…
With the very people, supposed to be her guardians,
The ones she fears the most?

I open the second journal.
Questions of an adolescent wearing dark clothes with pimples and a shining forehead,
Arms wrapped around his body.
Trembling so hard his teeth can be heard down the hall,
And people laugh.
People laugh and point and scream words at him—words he hardly knows that cut through his core like a carving knife.

“These problems never seem to go away.
How can we claim we’ve come so far when a young child is found with a noose around her neck and a note pinned to her clothes?

“How can we say that some day we’ll all be friends when we still utter words of hatred at strangers,
And watch with twisted pleasure as a life is ruined and a heart is shattered? 
Tell me how it’s not okay to break someone’s nose, but okay to break their spirit—
How come we can reach a hand halfway across the world but cannot give one to our neighbor in need.

“Tell me why violence is the language we share—and why we have to share one language at all.
If language is the only way we can communicate,
Then let love be our connecting word.
Let fear be gone from a child in her mother’s arms, afraid of monsters under her bed.
Let those monsters not be called her mother or her father.

“It’s not about getting through or living with—it’s about feeling and breathing and holding on tight. About accepting, not tolerating.”

Journal number three is in my hands. It feels cold like a still heart but it’s alive like a newborn child. I pull back its cover and read the words of a grown woman as she weeps and remembers.

“Once, I believed I was ugly, and once I wanted to die. But now as I sit here alone in a crowd I realize why I once loathed myself and my life.
I once gazed into the mirror and with a black pen in my hand;
Drew dotted lines across my cheeks where I would some day hallow them out with a scalpel.

“Took a blade to my wrists and tried to see what would happen, but all I could do was scrape my skin and cry—I don’t want to die! 
I want to live and feel and bleed and see. I want my soul to be together and whole and alive.
I want to remember my life as a scrapbook page, thrown in a cardboard box on the top shelf of my closet with other old memories.

“Cobwebs in every corner brushed aside with a feather duster.
I want to use a wad of paper towels doused in alcohol to remove the dust from my mirror and have the courage to cry out loud:
I AM BEAUTIFUL.
I was always beautiful.
I was beautiful when I walked with my friends on the beach at midnight.
When I watched my love’s chest rise and fall with every breath—
Fascinated by the number of breaths he took.
Hoping some day I could breathe like him.
Heave sighs like him.
Rhythmically and poetically breathe.”

I open journal number four. 

“He used to breathe, but now he doesn’t.
Now I remember the years I spent thinking about death.
The years I spent crying in bathrooms,
The time I wasted asking questions when I should have been answering them.
The problem isn’t that we are cruel and abusive—
The problem is that we are complacent.
Bullying has ravished our world like an epidemic.
Be the vaccination. Be the narcotic. Be the cure.

“So that two hundred years from now
Our children’s children will only know of war from old movies,
Only hear of bigotry in textbooks.
Ask their mothers, “Was there really a time when people used to end their own lives?”
And never have to sit, reading through long-forgotten journals and wondering
How we can go so far and stay so very much the same.”