Excerpts From a Lonely Heart

The Beginning (Paradoxical Loudness)

She was loud.

Her head buzzed constantly:
a beehive with working bees.
Powerful turmoils audibly
Silent.
A living paradox
A disease
"She barely speaks",
They all said,
And on her cheeks,
Crimson parasites spread.

These words,
Her demons,
Haunted her for weeks.
"Why are you so quiet?"
Yet what a contradiction:
in her head lived a riot.

The apple that was her life
was not even ripe yet.
Despite the vile,
Wicked, people around her,
Her heart was a blur,
She could find fireflies in the dark,
Even if no one could.

She is not ordinary,
They all said.
Her intelligence is above her age,
Yet loud enough she isn't,
They all said.
If only they knew this would be her cage,
Barbed wire prison
For many years.

Her innocence was praised,
Her pure mind
Condescendingly above all.
If only they knew,
Appearing fragile and small,
was what she was the most frightened to do.

She was little,
And she looked at the other kids,
And told herself she'd rather have
A heart brittle
Yet confident
Than soft:
A personality lost.

Her butterfly wings were not frail,
yet she thought they were.
Logic and sentiments fought a deadly war:
logic brainwashed in her skull,
By what?
What
They said.

Who she was
Who she wanted to be
Polar.
Yet she never would have changed
If being called quiet
Wasn't a term so deranged.

They said
Stuff,
Like a lion talking to a mouse,
Supercilious.
It all came down to one thing:
After the wings
were shredded to a pulp,
It was fucking enough.

A/N: This is the first poem I ever truly wrote. I recognize it's pretty fragmented, confusing, and frankly not my best work, but I still want to include it in this anthology as I believe that it encompasses the way my journey began. I began writing as a way to cope with my loneliness during a dark part of my life. Who we will be and who we are would not exist without who we used to be: a beginning.