Stupid,

dumb,

idiotic,

special,
incapable,
and slow
are not who I am;
she thinks to herself as she walks
the halls with those she,
for some reason unknown to her,
calls “friends”
and she continues to contemplate yet another fact:
why, if she considered them
“friends”
and they, her the same,
do they say these things
imply these things
do these many, now everyday things
that go so overlooked making her feel
inadequate, incapable
-all they pronounce her to be-
even though they try
to act a teasing, playful manner
-justifying their many stinging zingers of comments with other phrases
like “you know I love you”
or the ever famous “just kidding”-
the words, no matter the tone used
burn, tear, embed, and settle into her very center
burrowed in permanently;
entering through her ears
calculated by her brain
felt by her hands
understood by her heart
and absorbed into her whole being as each cell within her
saps up, clings to, and never resigns
each cheerfully harsh word
until she, who knows herself better than those outsiders
those “friends”,
that force this deceit into her consciousness,
believes them to be true as well-
accepting them as veracity so intently
that the only words she can find to describe herself
-that she knew to be
beautiful, vibrant, intelligent, fascinating, perseverant and very much
alive-
morph into atrocities
of fatal descriptions
that appall when uttered in her own speech,
but if they could read their own script
that endlessly plants these verbal wounds
into her vocabulary
-and note how they baffle at her lack of confidence-
they would recognize why she sees herself from appalling sights;
they could see why she is accustomed
to verbally demeaning herself
in such a manner
since they would see that she,
in fact, was taught;
their example
left it no wonder the words she put herself into
sounded like theirs:
slow,
incapable,
special,
idiotic,
dumb,
and stupid
yet, as she describes herself as such,
she can’t help but wonder
who
would ever stand
to be named such things.