She was 17 years old when heart heart was broken.



She was a 17 year old teenage girl who was angry.

And this anger was caused by grief,

and this grief by an understanding that she

was shattered.



Her eyes were like pools

old portals on a young body.

Like fireflies that had their light

snuffed out.



In her anger, she turned to violent poetry.

Using her voice, she slammed the culture

that caused her to feel 1000 years old when she was just a child.

Using her mouth

she drove holes through their arrogance and stuffed pain in them too.



The doctor's told her parents that she was a danger

that she could kill someone,

that she was a threat to everything around her. But they never asked her what she thought of this.



In truth?

She couldn't hurt a fly.

For she lived and breathed and loved

like a starving man who eats the first food he found in years.



The only person she could possibly hurt was herself

someone who died a long time ago.

Someone who had hopes and joys and fears.

Who spawned universes in her head for fun on stormy days.



You may ask why she had not died long ago.

The answer lies in the fact that she was broken, not destroyed.

Broken people are as tough as nails.

As flexible as a piece of pasta boiled for just the right amount. and though their shells are tough,

they are truly fragile.



They depend on medication to keep the demons in their soul out.



So can you imagine how she must have felt,

when for the second time in two years,

she learned that her best friend had committed suicide

because the weight of the world was too much for him to hold up against?



These people might be fragile but they have iron wills to collapse upon.And at this news she picked up her pen and started to write,

to write and curse the deity that put the man she loved 1000 miles away,

the monster that stole her friend's soul,

the demon that could tear through mountains

but could not end her suffering and tear through the skin and bones that enclosed her chest.



She considered putting her head on her old cracked journal and crying.

Yet she was an expert at crying in her mind,

and let acceptance flow out from beneath her eyes.

because she took a certain pride in the fact

that this awesome and terrible world could not break her. That she was strong enough to enclose evils in her body and not let them move an inch.

That she could turn her rage into words and her words into challenges.

That she could fall in love again

after she was betrayed by two people

him and herself

and they ran off together leaving her in their dust.



Because she had promised herself that one day

she would find someone who made her self control mean something

because what no one else knew

is that the last words her best friend told her

the night before he died

were to achieve peace.



That evening she walked out of her home

she walked to the phone and called his number.

And took a picture.



30 years later,

she took that picture out from beneath photos of her wedding,

her children,

her new life.



And she whispered.

I can cry now.