1

He was a room

With a door sealed shut forever. 

Slim, dark cracks ran up his walls, and

In the center stood a man 

With fatherhood in his heart,

Fear in his eyes,

And a fiery rage burning his mind…

With a roar, the man strikes the walls,

The room withers in pain, 

The cracks grow larger,

The man shouts,

‘Why don't you fix them yourself?’

The room says nothing,

For a single tremor risks the house crashing down.

The boy gazes in the mirror.

With mechanical, rehearsed, detained emotion,

His hands pull up his shirt

To see the cracks have spread 

Throughout his body

In the form of big blue splotched

Bruises on his arms and stomach.

For a moment, a tear lingers on his eyelids

But he refuses 

And the tear trickles back into his eye.

He walks to school 

A bulky sweater hanging from his meek frame

Someone walks by him,

And asks,

‘Are you alright? You look tired,’

And his door is almost opened,

But a chilling wind of memories slams it shut

And the boy looks up, and forces himself to smile, and replies,

‘I’m fine’.

2

She was a tree

With vermillion leaves of joy, of innocence,

A heart of gold

And a soul of youth.

A fateful day came in her life,

When she received a note

Precariously thrown onto her desk.

She held it to her heart, and brought it home,

And as she picked it up, opened it, read it, over and over,

Her cheeks filled with a rosy glow,

Her eyes alone returned every bit of care the note had been created with,

It was as though the sun’s warm, loving rays had engulfed the tree,

Giving sunlight to every branch and leaf, its energy teeming with life.

Our heroine’s pen dashed over a piece of paper,

Writing every bit of infatuated thought she could conjure

Upon a note of response that she would leave

In her admirer’s proximity

The following day.

And soon, she began receiving more and more,

And it felt euphoric, was it not supposed to?
But soon, the warmth of her compatriot

Went awry; an icy lust began revealing itself

From under its chartreuse cloak 

The kindly crafted notes turned to valiantly written threats,

She tried to stop it,

But he simply wouldn’t leave her be,

Soon, they had morphed into pure delusion on his part,

His darkest fantasies, desires,

But to her disgust,

An uncanny force told her,

Keep reading…

The harsh shift filled the tree with a perilous frost,

Creeping into its very core, the culmination of its being,

So cold the leaves had withered up,

Fallen down, for the rest of time,

Knowing that the cold had settled in forever,

Leaving only a chassis of what could’ve been,

Should’ve been

A happy child.

3

He was a statue

Unable to move how he pleased

Unable to speak his own words

Unable to shake off

The legacy coated in cold, hard steel

That laid before him on a timeline

He never chose.

A statue is to stand still with a placid look,

An honor to the hero

Whose face is burned into its metal for eternity.

But he was no hero

He was but a boy

Framed to be a hundred times more

Than anything he ever wanted.

The boy had come of age

To choose what sands would be pouring

Through the hourglass of his future.

And yet he wasn’t ready.

All around him, he saw smiles, parties, celebrations,

A toast to his graduation,

A whisper about his career, 

A laugh in conversation, a laugh of his mother’s voice…

He wasn’t ready.

Behind closed doors, surges of trepidation rush through him, 

Seizing him like a pair of shaking hands, never letting go,

Tears pour out onto his table, as if through a sieve 

With one too many holes poked through it 

By the sharp, sharp needle of ignorance

Which had stabbed everyone around him one too many times,

For no matter how many threads he put through the needle,

No matter how many times he cried for help,

The needle was pulled too fast,

The thread had slipped out,

The sieve had been punctured,

The cries had been ignored,

And the adults in the boy’s life never saw with the clarity he did

Through the statue-like facade they took him as, 

He wasn’t anywhere near ready.

Sources:

Malhotra, Savita, and Swapnajeet Sahoo. “Antecedents of Depression in Children and Adolescents.” Industrial Psychiatry Journal, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198600/. 

“Teen Depression.” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 12 Aug. 2022, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/teen-depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20350985. 

“Teen Depression: Causes, Symptoms, Heredity, and Treatments.” WebMD, WebMD, www.webmd.com/depression/teen-depression. Accessed 11 June 2024.