The trees brush against the window, the wind creeping through a crack in my window. Rain beats against the glass, footsteps of nature. The thunder echoes outside, giant’s footsteps. My hands blur on the keys, writing what is and what could have been, past and future blending into one being. My cursor hits publish, light reflected off my window, showing my year-stained face.

A life can be so easily crushed, turned into dust,, living on in sadness. The whispers can so easily be shouts, hitting cords that haven’t been struck in a while. The shouts can so easily become a knife, a gun, a death. We read the Concubine story in class today, and no one seemed at all moved. People joked and laughed as the teacher droned on about the death count in a bored voice. Just another day. But it wasn’t. Not for me. Because those people had cares and worries, friends, enemies, lives.

I sit in my room and wonder if any of them realized what was going to happen, how something so ‘small’ can end up killing you. How not standing up, or even just laughing with the group, can ruin someone’s day, push them to the brink. My tears hit the keys, turning them slick and white, brushing away the grime, and becoming pure. Was that how they thought of it? Wiping the school pure? Wiping out of all the people that made your life hell, taking the step and hoping that there is something better on the other side. But that wasn’t what they thought of, was it? Because for them, the better side was death. Because it wasn’t enough to hurt themselves, and the people that cared about them. It had to be everyone else too, a scar on the whole country.

Flying though school, gun firing at people that may not have realized what they did. The terribleness of it all, cruelty of life. Because at that moment, they wasn’t thinking about the scar, or the families that would grieve, because for them, those people had stopped being human a long time ago. Those people had stopped smiling, or if they hadn't, they didn't see it. They saw the laughing as they were pushed into a wall, they saw the table, where they sat alone every lunch, and they saw their phone lit up with another text from hell. That’s what they saw when they looked at them, they saw people who had tortured, and laughed, and left them alone when they most needed someone, anyone, to help. They were no longer human, these people now dead, because of what they did.

They grieved, the families, not understanding; why? They saw their child, at age three, wobbling across the kitchen floor, they saw the tears shed at the first heartbreak, they saw an innocent, their darling, they saw a child at the height of childhood dead in a instant. But for them, they weren't innocent, or darling, or a child. They had become monsters.

They took away my life, the daemons. They crushed my confidence until all that was left was a shadow, a shadow of what I used to be. I wished that it would end, but it’s just hope, and I lost that long ago. My keys click, the fingers flying. My cursor, publish. This is my solace, my safe place. This is the only thing that is mine anymore. The machine beeps, warning me of the little time I have left. In class tears welled up in my eyes, but they were not for the killed. My tears were for the killers. I see myself in them, the tortured looks on their faces, glad that it would finally be over.

They have killed my soul, and I have no pity for them. They took my fragile innocence and mauled it, twisting me into a knot of loyalty and pain. I knelt, obedient to their every will, a hurricane of loss and betrayal swirling around me in panicked circles. I would’ve liked to sink under the sea, lost to the world. Alone, but free. Free, of the taunts, the whispers, the calls, the texts, the posts, the false concern, the world as I know it.


Would it be better? I ask myself. Would I be happy? Or would I forever regret the choice I made, the battles lost. I stayed on this Earth, if only for my short time, hating every moment but these. Where I can speak, even if no one listens.

The letters on my hand, what do they mean? Everyone asks. They remind me, so I never forget. They pull me through, forcing me to remember my mistakes, to not become a martyr. Just Listen. It my not make sense to you, but it makes sense to me. I must listen, to the past and the future. I must listen, to that voice inside my head, telling me I have not changed. I must listen, for the world between the lines. I must listen, and I must never forget.