"...it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in

intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

She had been fragile since the day she was born.
She did not have the nimble, delicate limbs of a dancer;
She had never broken a bone,
And yet she was fragile.

When she was six,
Her brother made fun of her curly hair
She sobbed tearfully
Like she had scraped her knees on the playground cement.

When she was ten,
She learned about the Holocaust for the first time
A permanent knot formed in her stomach.
The burning flesh,the starving stomachs, the inexplicable atrocities
Stayed with her
Like scars on her wrist.

When she was thirteen,
She was caught telling a lie.
Her teacher told her she had never been more disappointed.
The guilt of it left her with voices in her head,
Like a never-satisified parent
Yelling at her
Judging her,
Shaming her.
                                                  

When she was fifteen,
Her friend confessed that his parents abused him.
His mother beat him mercilessly with a hairbrush
Like it was a hammer beating a bent nail.
His step-father touched him
In ways a person should never be touched.
The sickness of human nature left her sick
With a pounding headache and incessant nausea
Like she had been struck with the flu

When she was sixteen,
She discovered how indifferent the world was,
How superficial and how insensitive people could be.
Her worst fear was to give into the pervasive apathy
So she tried to feel everything,
To empathize with everyone
She walked with the unsteady gait of an overburdened horse,
The pangs of the world's sadness overcame her
Like waves of a merciless shore
That refused to abate,
Like a veteran’s nightmare
Still haunting him after the war.

When, finally, she turned seventeen,
Her knees scraped with a brother's crude words,
Her hands cut with the knives of inhumanity,
Her mind overrun by consuming self-loathing,
Her immune system unable to fight the disease of parents’ twisted love
Her body drowned in the ceaseless tides of agony,
She did not have the nimble, delicate limbs of a dancer,
She had never broken a bone,
And yet she was broken.