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Becoming Human
They once called us flowers
They said our skin was made of snowbells,
our lips were like lush petals kissed by the blood of an angel.
We were roses; we had thorns
that made us play hard-to-get.
The only thing we ever did
was giggle and smile.
We were perfect.
We were
perfect flower girls that turned heads as they walked through town
Perfect flower girls that were immune to any emotion besides happiness
Perfect flower girls that seemed like we couldn’t possibly be real.
They said they would love us forever.
And with our whole hearts, we believed them.
But as the creases became more apparent
the cracks that came with our age erupted on our once smooth petals
as giggles were replaced with sighs and
smiles with looks of indifference
As happy mixed with confusion and sadness and questions…
They stopped calling us flowers.
And all of a sudden,
We were Monsters.
Forever
a word filled with such naive hope and promise,
became nothing more than another betrayal.
another vow they never kept,
another word they turned their back on.
We could only watch as they began to turn their backs on us, too.
For weeks on end, they disappeared.
Without the nourishment of their words to feed our starving stems
our petals turned crinkled shades of browns,
our leaves began to shrivel in starvation.
We were too weak to run away.
When they finally returned
and laid their eyes upon our decaying bodies
their faces became twisted with disgust.
Hate rose from their palms
anger boiled in their bones
We knew they had come back to attack.
As they began their assault,
we suffered silently.
we remembered
How their eyes were once silk
stroking our cheeks and cupping our faces
But no.
Their eyes were now knives tracing our every feature
criticizing our every freckle
making slashes on our cheeks too numerous to count.
Their words stabbed pain into our skin
until pain was all we were made of.
Tears from our eyes spurted out like the blood from our hearts
and for the first time, we were crying.
We were crying for the things we never realized,
the things we should have known.
Because
they loved us while we were flowers
while we were young
while we played games
while we had no weaknesses
while our only emotion was happy.
However, the moment we shed our semblance of perfection,
the moment we became real,
we became monsters.
We were nothing else.
There was nothing left of us but the ugly.
The ugly emotions
the wrinkles
The bruised hearts
the need for unconditional love.
They called us monsters.
But how could they have called us monsters,
when all we were finally becoming was human?
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This poem addresses the topic of beauty standards and the struggle for acceptance in today's world.