Catastrophe's Classroom

Welcome to a modern American classroom.

Take a good look around. What do you see?

Smiling teachers, friendly paintings on the wall, clean seats left vacant because the class is playing ring around the rosy as if there wasn’t a care in the world.

This is elementary school after all, how bad could it be?

Now let me show you what you don’t see.

There’s a little girl in the back of the classroom, with a glass heart, and clumsy hands surround her. She wears a tiara so that she’ll feel pretty.

So that people will take her treasures at face value, so that people won’t bother to glance past her skin. She tries to blend in with all the other girls, disguising pain with a sparkle.  

People can’t see her precious smile falling into a million pieces because it’s concealed behind a curtain of neatly brushed hair. Memories, frost bitten by the bitter cold teeth of fear form the elixir of her blue eyed tears, streaming down her hidden cheeks.

She’s a princess with a twist.

She’s locks herself in a tall tower just to stay above the roars of the beast that bellows profane wrecking balls through the hallways below her.

She’s on a quest for her own prince charming, a knight in shining armor who can rescue her from the monsters of her life. Sadly that knight will become any boy who can keep her high above the problems that await her back in her tower.

Now from the front of the class:

The teacher is quick to snap at the ‘bully’, aiming the weapon of her voice right at his head. Lining him up in her vocal crosshairs and firing away as he tears a little girls picture in half.

The paper separates right between the smiles of the crayon scratched mommy and daddy, the boy’s hands playing the part of a cruel and sad reality.

The torn halves fall through the air with the echo of “What’s wrong with you?”.

Little does she know that the hands of life tore the picture of his smiling family between his parents last Month, separating their canvases forever. But in the middle of the portrait was his heart….now ripped in half.

His life is split between two worlds, and he’s falling between the cracks of a broken home.

He tears the girls picture because he’s forced to see the world through divided eyes,

and no amount of scotch of tape is going to piece together the shreds of his broken heart or fix the pain he carries inside of him.

In row four you’ll see a girl who get’s picked on every day:

She feels like a pile of tattered flesh thrown into a room of vultures.

Words tear through her like a black beak stabbing through to her bones.

She doesn’t fit in. She doesn’t play along. She stays by the old boom box during recess.

The voices in the music are kinder….she lets the music replace her blood, flowing through her, keeping her heart on beat. She let’s the sound fill her ears. It’s her shield against the insults. It’s like the sound waves drown out the pain and her smile is distorted by the final ripples of a cruel word.

She doesn’t hear them anymore….the words don’t hurt.

She just sees their lips moving and pretends they’re forming nice things.

For the length of a song she can turn insults into compliments and escape into the music.

Hiding beneath the teacher’s desk sits the boy who never pulls his nose away from the pages of his notebook.

He uses his crayons to create scenes of complete chaos.

Wielding Orange and yellow to portray the sun dropping on the heads of a thousand stick figures holding hands with the child they pay no attention to.

Red and green to paint the blood seeping through the scratched out grass because the girl with the fixed smile couldn’t fake it any longer.

Blue……..blue is for the waves of turmoil that crash from an ocean of tears that run off of his pillow case at night.

Using black to create a picture of his own mind as he sits in the corner to avoid the shrapnel of an explosive conversation erupting in his living room.

And only upon thumbing through the pages of his mind would you ever know there a problem.

No, let’s fix this. Let’s take away the crayons, let’s turn down the music.

Let’s file down the rough edges of personal struggle and force the kids to fit a smiling society’s puzzle board.

Send them to school. Let someone else deal with their minds; let someone else fake a smile at them as they take away their star for participation in a joyful game of ring around the rosy.

But when ashes are brought to ashes and we all fall down, don’t be surprised if some choose not to get back up.