I can still feel it.
I can still feel the lump in my throat from simply walking into my very own middle school. It’s supposed to be “full of pride” and “bring me closer to my peers.”
But this school will always burn with the memories it holds. The memories that I still can’t seem to erase, even after leaving the school entirely.
I shouldn’t have to feel the need to avoid someone in my own school, even if I had done nothing wrong, at least that’s what I thought. I thought of all the times I could have changed my fate and what would have happened, but I didn’t. I tried to run away from it, but it keeps its hole on the back of my brain for everyone to see and know, but not to understand. I always wish I had run away faster, though.
I thought I knew what the right decision was, the right way to go about this horrendous topic that is being pushed away in conversation. Except that never got me anywhere. It got me more and more condescending advice that was never helpful. The words that ended up tearing my own breath out of my lungs when someone brings it up. The breath that helped me support my way through eighth grade, and the breath that kept me from collapsing.
I still felt the weight of someone else’s future in my arms. My own story becomes the one that ruins theirs. My story. My story is twisted and turned into something smaller. Something less important than what it has become to me. The memories hold me down from what I could say and do.
How could this happen? How could the people I talk to tell me to do the same thing, and yet it still feels wrong? It still feels like it won’t be worth the cost of bringing it to the surface again.
Now what? Now, do I bring more attention to myself to see if it is still relevant to everyone? Or, do I take the silent words everyone speaks and just move on? I can’t do that. I can’t keep living in my own pool of thought and regret, finding myself crying alone over something everyone thinks about and expecting that I don’t think about it daily.
I can’t pull the fear out of myself that I could go through that again. That someone else could be going through it right now. Another little girl is being pushed to her limits in the silence of her mind because she can’t seem to find the right words to tell someone the truth. The truth is that she doesn’t want to get up in the morning. The truth of how everyone else has moved on, and that the therapy feels like it may never work.
I may never be able to get past that feeling when someone brings up my eighth-grade year. I may never get past the feeling that I could go through it again. I pray that this won’t happen to another kid just trying to get their education.
