The cliché is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
Now this will be a deeper concept for a shallow thinker, so I ask that you pay close attention and follow along.
These people, they get to know the introduction that’s right behind the cover page of our books, like “what’s your favorite color?” yellow. “What’s your favorite movie?” coralline. “What’s your favorite food?” chicken.
They think they know us by this little amount of information and then, oh God, and then they go off acting like they know me… us, I mean us, like they are the authors of our book, or the illustrator’s of the pictures on these here pages,
Classifying us off of this little information,
Judging us on these facts, or lack thereof.
And they think they know us.
Every other day I sit in a class of no more than five maybe six students.
To me none of them knew me, none of them understood me, and none of them knew what I had been through.
Two weeks ago I found out that me and not one but two of the girls in my class hand more qualities in common, than we thought.
Today, one of the girls caught me looking at her arm, which looked similar to mine; she wrapped it in her black lace jacket and proceeded to fold her arms.
It was uncanny how she had done it, she reminded me, of me, an act I’d done plenty of times before to avoid humiliation of what I had done.
The other girl playing with her hair was when I noticed them, they were beautiful just like mine, organized well, just like mine, but yet they were somehow different than mine.
I could tell all three of us, had “cats”.
And they think they know us.
Your words,
Their words,
Were like razors, sharper than the one in my hand, cut holes, in our ears and in our hearts, deeper than any knife could!
Your words of judgment restrained me to believe I was only what you said I was.
Again and again, one after another,
Your words in my ears,
Your hate in my heart,
And another on my arm.
Sitting on the cold tiled floor of my bathroom, unable to comprehend the severity of what I had done once again,
Stopping only because of the mess, as it ran down my arms, leaving darkened trails from its path and clotting between my hand and the floor.
I went on like nothing happened.
These girls, in my class, had probably experienced this pain before, I could tell by our matching scars from a war that WE WOULD win.
We would overcome these words, shot at us like bullets from a gun
And we dodged them with our strength of knowing who WE are
And we would be the happy people everyone perceived us to be,
And they think they know us,
But they didn’t
We didn’t want acceptance from them, we wanted acceptance from ourselves
We wanted to love ourselves, and know that when they said “it was going to be okay”, that it really was.
One day the three of us are going to gain our wings, and become who we are really meant to be
And they thought they knew me.