When they ask you why

You’re socially awkward,

You want to say

I was not like this

When the sun rudely barged into my room

This morning at seven

Without knocking.

You want to say

I stood in front of my mirror

And used a cookie cutter

To carve a smile onto my face

The cold metal

Jabbing cruelly at my mind

Who was still wallowing in yesterday’s dreams.

You want to say

I ripped out my heart

With bloody and trembling hands

Emotions still seeping from the dangling veins and arteries

And stuffed a steel box into the gaping hole

Listening to the emptiness clanging off of the bare metal walls.

You want to say

I taped crutches

To my drowsy eyelids

So that they wouldn’t collapse

In the middle of class

And send me off to Hypnos’s emergency room.

You want to say

I used an ostrich feather duster

Silently shaking with the animal’s pain

To brush off the depression coating

My slumped shoulders

Because I know y’all are allergic.

You want to say

I donned a knight’s helmet

Reeking with the stench of Death

To ward off the poisonous arrows

That would surely fly in my direction

At school

Because introverts are merely custom-made

Laughing stock.

You want to say

I wrapped myself in yellowed linen

Removed

All the organs within my body

That were stamped with the seal of Life

And put them on my dressing table in a clay jar.

Thus I became the mummies in the British Museum

Mute, lifeless, exhibited, and continents away

From where I belonged

In the deserts of solitude.

You want to say

Not all who are silent cannot speak

Because beneath all these layers

I am shouting

But slowly drowning

In the echoes.

But instead you smile

Hoping no one notices

The grimace inside.