Blood stains red,
And grass stains green,
But what color do tears stain?

Out the room I bound,
Leisurely strolling down the hall,
Pass through the side door to the courtyard,
And what a surprise it is to see Carla Santini,
The biggest bully in the entire school—LITERALLY.
Always arguing
Always trying to pick a fight with people who are hand grenades ready to detonate
But I've never seen her like this.
Sitting on the stone bench with shoulders hunched over,
Her face buried in her hands.
Silence prevails as I approach cautiously.
I expect her to lash out as usual,
Wait for her to scream, “What do you want, shorty?”
But she doesn’t.
With head and shoulders folded over
She’s crying.
Silent tears escape her closed eyes.
Dumbstruck I stand
Before pulling out of my jacket pocket a tissue
A delicate Kleenex dangles limply from my fingers,
Waiting for a reaction of some sort
Of any sort, just to know she’s still alive
Eyes turn upward from the ground.
Eyes red and bloodshot,
Cheeks soaked with tears.

She acts tough
But really and truly,
She’s falling to shambles on the inside living with her reality.
How can she deal with the fact
That her dad doesn’t want her?
That her mom doesn’t think she’s good for anything?
What is she supposed to do now that she and her mom had a bad fight last night?
A BIG fight.
She doesn’t want to admit that she feels lost.
Doesn’t want anyone to think her weak
Because she can’t deal with her own problems
But now it all comes out
It opens up the floodgate of bottled-up emotions.
She lets it out to me
To me
And she weeps openly like a little child who’s afraid of the monster under their bed
And I hold her in an embrace that could hold the world.
Stroke her hair like a mother would to her little girl.
I tell her that everything is going to be alright,
Despite the fact that I know no more of what the future holds than anyone else.
It is here in my arms that she cries fully and openly until the hurt goes away
And I know now that even Carla Santini,
The biggest bully in the entire school
Is just as human as the rest of us.

When we cry, we don’t want people to laugh at us.
For that matter,
We don’t want people to point at us, gawk at us, or gossip about us.
We want the world to love us just so we know that someone does care.
We want people to embrace us in a bear hug
That surrounds us in the love we so desperately need.
We need people to finally realize
That we’ve been hurting on the inside,
Bleeding inwardly until we’re emotionally battered
To the point where we can’t deal with the pressures of the world anymore.
So blood stains red and grass stains green,
But tears,
Tears stain clear,
So the world doesn’t know we’ve been crying.