Ballad of a Dying Girl [✔]

2.

there's a quote from a movie that i like: 

you turn the page.

it means you don't look back, 

you don't dwell on the past

(don't you dare even remember it, don't you dare).

i've used it since i was the tender age of fourteen, 

all wrapped up in books,

 and a betrayal still simmering underneath the surface of my bones

(along with a sickness creeping into the tissue of my brain, my joints, my tissue).

you turn the page.

i'd whisper it sometimes,

when my childhood grew too quiet,

the kind of silence right before birds flee,

when my teenage years grew too loud,

the kind of volume that shatters eardrums.

it resonated with me in the empty afternoons where books were my only solace,

where the smell of the library kept me afloat,

when i could no longer keep up with friends who no longer felt, wanted, or loved what i did.

i craved rest more than companionship,

and they did not understand

(but neither did i, not yet).

they could not comprehend a world where one is too bone tired after school to speak,

to play,

to talk about boys.

i did not understand my peers,

but i understood other worlds,

like they made up the fabric of me instead of my parents.

that was another comforting, dragging thought.

i watch now as people cherish their past, hold tightly - and fondly - onto memories that i do not have,

do not possess.

i was too busy turning the page.

an excuse, i suppose, for the life i did not have 

(and never will).