She always wrote poetry when she was angry. She had been writing poetry for a month now.

She was wrapped in a shroud of blankets, lying dormant on her bed, as she furiously scribbled in her little green journal. Stray strands of un-brushed hair fell in shambles around her neck, the rest of it wrapped in a rushed bun that was quickly falling apart. She herself was falling apart.
She had not showered in three days, only leaving the room to eat and use the bathroom, her door locked and tightly shut so no could interrupt her writing.

Outside her door, she could hear her parents’ worried conversation, strained whispers sweeping underneath the cracks in her door, her parents’ frustration seeping into the air like poison.

Occasionally, her mother would gently knock on her door. “Hope,” she would murmur, her voice saturated with anxiety, “are you okay?”

Hope would mutter a simple yes, her mother’s breath pausing for a few moments outside her room, possibly hoping her daughter would suddenly have a change of heart and realize how incredibly selfish stupid silly dramatic teenageish she was being. Her mom would leave after a couple of moments with a sigh, realizing that no more words would be exchanged, abandoning Hope to her writing.

Hope loved poetry for its lists, for its rambling, lack of rules, refusal to submit to any sort of grammatical deity. She liked it for its passion, the heat-of-the-moment rants or observations, or simply the way the words were strung together, how they sounded when spoken aloud. She liked how so much could be fitted into so little, like confetti in a shoe box.

Her words could never be painted onto a novel, too messy and chaotic for punctuation and paragraphs, and even if she could figure out how to coax them into sentences, she could never quite understand how to transition them into something chronological. There was too much to say, too much left unsaid since it all came crashing down, and she didn’t much understand it herself.

So instead she documented her story in poetry, in line after line, stanza after stanza of beautiful, disorganized poetry.

And when she was done, she took a deep breath, smiled, and opened her bedroom door with a quiet push.