secrets.

quite a sad story about ghosts

when i started this collection of poems, i'd planned to keep it just as that: poems. confessions, if you will, about what goes on in my brain as i live my life as a Depressed, Ignored Teen. i do write stories and i quite like to do little pieces about hopelessness and pain and all that joyous nonsensical stuff, and this idea came about and i like it a lot.

and then i wrote this idea, and i decided if anything deserved to be involved in Silence than this story did, because it's Quite Sad like most of the poems included, and Quite Sad things belong here because I am Quite Sad and this is about me. so, enjoy my thing called Quite A Sad Story About Ghosts.

I should have realized when I was 10. It took me straight to 17 before I saw any glimpse of a problem.

It wasn't new. In fact, I don't remember a time when I didn't see them. I met my first when I was a young child and my parents would tuck me in to bed. My second was on my 6th birthday. These two stuck with me, didn't age but clung to me. A baby in a cradle that lie abandoned in the room across from mine. His eyes told me his name was Bobby, and he couldn't sleep unless on his stomach. A young girl with thin braids and a loud, raspy cough called Trinity.

She used to spend a lot of time in the hospital, but she got out soon after turning 6. I told my mom about Trinity a few days after we met. She said it was normal to have imagined friends at my age. I told her about Bobby, and she didn't talk to me much after that.

Bobby was replaced by Auntie when I was 10. She was the first red flag, because she wasn't very kind to me. She yelled and cried and kept me up until the early hours of the morning with the stories of her husband. He would beat her, rape her, neglect her. I had to grow up rather quickly just to understand what she told me. I made her tea sometimes. She never drank it, but I could see she appreciated it anyhow.

When I turned 12, Trinity disappeared. I can't tell you where she went, but I was joined by a boy called Thomas, who was a bit older than me, a bit later. He wasn't too kind either, and liked to yell at me when I would approach him, storm off in the middle of conversations, sometimes he would even go to hit me. I didn't know why he didn't like me, but I guessed it had something to do with the deep welts on his back. I wouldn't be very kind if I had those scars. I bet they hurt quite a bit.

The people only I could see got meaner and meaner. After Thomas left came Angie, who looked down her nose at me and commented rather rudely about my clothes. Auntie left then, which hurt quite a bit as I had known her for almost 4 years when she did.

Auntie was replaced with Annie, who knew Angie and liked to join her in teasing me. I quite missed knowing Trinity, who was the nicest person I'd ever known.

But then he came.

He came with his patchy, dark skin and haunted eyes. His rough voice (I could only guess it was a result of the dark bruises around his neck) and the lines on his wrist. When I saw his hips for the first time, we went outside to tan at the beginning of our first summer together, I was shocked by how many scars covered the skin on his hips.

He replaced both Angie and Annie, and I knew only him for several long months. Then a girl joined him. They didn't know each other at first, but they bonded quickly. She had scars like him, and she always complained of being hungry. Her name was Lily. I don't know exactly why Dan liked her so much, but I suppose she wasn't insufferable.

Then came Weston, whose arms only had vertical slices running along each wrist but still, Dan and Lily loved him.

I decided that I should give my arms some markings, too, and so I did that very same night.

Lily laughed when she saw me, Weston gave me a dark look. Dan didn't have much to say about it, but he gave me a tight hug.

Mom caught me the next time I was adding marks to my arm. She cried quite a bit, and rushed me to the hospital. I met with a counselor, who listened to my stories about Bobby and Thomas and Dan.

She taught me things I can do that don't involve carving my arms, but I still do it and I think she knows.

My marks spread so far up my arms that I ran out of room. I moved to my hips, and Dan saw them the summer after and didn't say a thing, but he kissed my temple and left me to tan alone.

Weston laughed when he saw how much I'd mutilated my own flesh. Mom couldn't look at me. Lily smiled and told me where I could find some medicine, but I don't know why.

I turned 17 and then I understood. Lily had long since left me, and Weston as well. Replaced by an angry man as old as my mother with white hair and laugh lines by his eyes. I've never seen him smile, but I guessed he must have before we met. Maybe before he got the hole in his chest.

Dan didn't talk to me much anymore, but I would see him quite often. He liked to give me tight hugs and duck away without looking twice at my arms.

I realized, a month before turning 18, that I hadn't laughed in a long while. I don't remember losing hope but it must have happened somewhere along the way to adulthood, because it was rare that I found motivation these days.

I failed most classes and wouldn't graduate my senior year so I dropped out. Dan avoided me for a while after that, my mom as well though they both said they supported me.

Sometimes I don't even get out of bed, or eat, or drink water. Mostly I just stare at the wall and feel empty. I don't miss my mom's sympathetic looks, but I suppose she doesn't try to hide them.

Dan started sitting on my bedside when I would have those especially bad days. And then I told him I didn't particularly want to live, and he said I shouldn't have to if I don't want to.

And he told me that he sees himself in me, in the way my hope drained so steadily I didn't know I had lost it until I right and truly had lost it. His marks, the ones on his arms and hips, appeared the same way as mine. First just one, and then a cluster, and then so many it was hard to see flesh.

He told me about his bruises, and how he'd hung himself when he turned 16, and he told me he didn't recommend it if I decided that I truly wanted to die because he didn't do it right and hung for a long time, his body flailing but his mind contentedly blank and so his last moments of life were spend conflicted, like the rest of him. That was why his skin was patchy, because of the time it took to hang himself.

Dan seemed happy to share his story with me, and a month after my 18th birthday, I decided to imitate it. Mine was much smoother, because I suppose I did it right and my neck broke right away.

Now, I spend my time with a teenaged girl called Melissa, with marks on her arms who seems to love Dan just as I did. She likes to speak to me before she goes to bed, talks about her father raping her as a child and her mother often being too drunk to notice. She tells me about her brother, who died like Bobby. He was put to sleep on his belly and just stopped breathing.

I can't help telling her about how I died, and Dan liked to join me.

I never did see Thomas, or Auntie, or Angie again. Not even Lily or Weston. I see my mom sometimes, but she doesn't see me, and I spend most of my time with Dan.

I'm quite a lot happier now than I was so many years ago, with Dan and Melissa with me. I like to run my fingers over the marks on my arms and practice breathing through my swollen throat and listen to the roughness of my voice and I like to think back on my life and laugh at myself for waiting so long.