Now from the previous chapter, you may assume that this next chapter will be about how I met new friends and began to enjoy life as I realized I was not aloneand this would be the beginning of an upwards progression in my life. I apologize for going against your expectation, dear reader, but that time has not come yet. We still have much more of a fall to go. Seveenth grade was much like sixth. Same silence, same obsession with the literary world, same emptiness. However, there was one crucial difference between the year previous and this one: poetry. On a day like any other in my English class, my teacher, Mrs. Pimienta, was having the class wwrite a poem on the bonds of friendship between our fellow classmates, or some subject of that like just as cheesy and contrived. I barely remember writing those first scratches on paper, my entrance into the largest blessing and curse I had ever and have ever bestowed upon myself, save for a title, "Not Afraid." Quite ironic considering the amount of fear and trepidation I had I felt as the class weas picked, one by one, to read their poems aloud in front of the class. Considering I was the class' resident mute, it is not unreasonable to reason that I feklt my heartstrings pull tight in my chest, as if I was waiting in line for the guillotine, just long enough to contemplate my fate but not nearly l;ong enough to prepare.
Then it was my turn. I was selected and I got up, towering over the class and yet feeling so very small, holding my notebook in shaky and sweaty palms. Dead silence fell ovfer the room as I read, at least as I recall it. When the last word was uttered and finished, I immediatly sat down, not daring to look around and approximate the response of my classmates to my writing, partially out of learned indifference and partly out of fear to arouse the tinniest inclination that I still caredwhat they thought. Then the teacher called me to her desk. Confused and anxious, I went yup, expecting the worst. Tutoring for inability to write, getting yelled at for grammar mistakes, bad grades, parent phone calls, anything. My mind seemed to travel into an infinite well of every possible dark result that could come into being in the 10 feet seperating my desk and that of my teacher's. But what came next, I will never forget for the rest of my days. My teacher looked me dead in the eyes, smiled widely, and said, "Would you mind if I put your poem in the yearbook?"
From that point on I was obsessed with my writing. I craved the same satisfaction I recieved from that day with hunger even more beastly than that I had previously for my books. But as I said before, dear reader, we are not to reach our arc of positivity yet. There is still a dark story needing to be told. And with all dark stories, it can only begin with one thing.
A girl.
The shadows overtook him
Sheltered in self-inflicted indifference
A silent one
Until they gve him his voice
AAnd then he spread his wings
And soared
