Defining Moment
#3 of Poetry
This one is less poetry as it isn't poetic. I still felt it should go in with the rest of my poetry.
I like to call this my Life Poem, a shortened version of the struggles in my life.
Life doesn't start when you're born.
That's just what I believe.
When you're that young, you have no recollection of the world you live in, it's all just incomprehensible memories and faded Polaroid images.
You come into the world not knowing what's going on.
You're too young to know what true happiness is, what it means to laugh until it hurts.
Too young to know what true anger is, vision and judgement clouded as rage boils over.
Too young to know what true pain is, like the kind you get when you stub your toe on a corner,
Or the kind you get when you realize that this world is not as forgiving as you once thought it was.
There is a message etched into everyone's book of life written so viciously, it bleeds through, soaking the pages.
That is, in my personal opinion, when a life starts. That is when it starts to shape.
The defining moment.
My defining moment started in fifth grade
Age ten
Sitting amongst young adolescent minds in a dark room while the map of what was going to happen to them over the next decade or so was drawn out before their eyes.
A guidebook of sorts telling us what we could and could not do.
But some eyes looked too deeply
Saw too many questions.
Those eyes went home to seek out answers.
Too many answers.
Such curiosity destroyed what childhood naivety I used to have, replacing the gentle scribbles in my life's book with sporadic entries like that of a broken fountain pen.
Splotchy.
The saying goes that curiosity killed the cat, but what drove the cat to fall was the lack of satisfaction
Because what it once thought made sense ended up causing more questions.
And a powerful question is often led by a deep desire to sate.
For the next half of my life, I would be thrust into a world I never asked for.
A world where my sense of being was chipped away with every trip
Slip up
Mistake,
Leaving behind a statue sculpted by its hands.
A piece of living art, moving and breathing, but feeling just as empty as the real thing.
In my middle school years, I found myself trapped within walls I erected,
Nailed together by my regrets and guilt,
Emotions that kept everything else inside, causing me to feel nothing but sorrow.
Once, twice, thrice, every relapse drove a nail through.
It took four years before I broke through that wall.
Too much happened too fast, and my desire for familiarity snapped under the pressure.
I had to leave it all behind,
All the friends and memories I had made, good and bad,
I couldn't stand being surrounded by it all anymore.
So 11th grade came around and a new page was turned.
With the ridges and wrinkles being left behind in my book, I felt free.
But the bleed through from my defining moment still showed,
Fresh, tainting the steps I took forward and always leaving a path to the past.
My attitude may have changed, but the situation stayed very much the same,
The blows hitting just as hard.
Experience provided resistance, but not resolution.
Every day brought a war,
A fight I would always lose.
A fight where my humanity was tested and bombarded by foreign figures.
Morning light not bringing new beginnings, but hopeless ends to a sleepless night,
Nights spent awake by artificial light.
To this day, my defining moment haunts me, keeps record of all the times I was beaten down.
And I know I'm not alone.
She was raised alone, and is still trying to find where she belongs.
He bears the scars from the mistakes of someone else's past.
Everything from addiction
To depression
To anxiety.
Broken families
Broken hearts
Broken people.
But even after being left stranded
Scarred
Shameful,
Even after laying on the page as fresh wounds stain the book once more,
We keep going.
We're still here.
The bruises and lacerations will heal for the most part.
The stains will dry and become a memory.
We keep going because
Maybe things will get better.
Maybe tomorrow won't hit so hard.
And maybe
Just maybe
We'll look behind and find that the defining moment isn't marking every step we take.
And that the next page will turn to a spotless start.