Introvert

18

'I 

will touch her 

gently 

with the back of

my bruised 

hands,

for these fingertips

have yet to 

earn

that softness' ~ Tyler Knott Gregson, Typewriter Series #767

 

||Shyanna||

The teacher stares at me as I explain what I mean by 'imperfectly written and in need of fixing'. To him, my work is nothing but something he must grade. To me, the ink I use should be served justice in being written in words I believe in. Instead, I am lying to a piece of paper that knows not of heart ache and pain, but only of the ink that is sprayed with little to no care along it.

"Shyanna, your writing is fine. It really is. You don't need to improve it; it's not possible. And even if it were, Shyanna, I wouldn't allow you to. Because at the moment you wrote the words on the page, they meant something. They may have meant that you were lying, but your thoughts meant something. It's inherently wrong to change that, Shyanna. I won't allow you to." He says, eyebrows inching higher with each cutting word.

"Sir, I don't like the words any more. We change everything in this world, we change thoughts and feelings and emotions, we change it quickly and sometimes we don't even remember how we felt saying things. The words are disjointed and splattered with such wrongness it might as well be written by somebody who hardly knows me. For instance, you know Niall? It's like he's writing it. He can see how I am, but nobody sees who I am. Because the words I write and the words I speak aren't the first things I think and say. Because I hide things away. Because I am human. I'm asking kindly, Sir, to change what doesn't matter." The idea that everything matters because it once did aches deep, I find. I detest the idea. Because it once mattered to me that Niall's smile caught the light and it once mattered to me that I was not fixed.

But neither of those things matter, any more, because I've evolved into someone less judging, less inherently hateful and more compassionate. I've grown, as everything does, into another Something. I don't care that Niall's braces make the light catch him, because light catches everything. I don't care that I'm not fixed because I can work towards it. I'll be a different person tomorrow, and a different person ten years from now. And if the words you write are lies, what's the point of not caring about those things? Because I might be lying about not caring. And that, in actuality, is terrifying. We live in a paradox of conceptualised idealisms, and if I wish to change an idealism that slipped past my pen and onto page, why should I not be allowed to edit?

"Shyanna." One word. My name. Twenty warnings in just three syllables. It terrifies me that my name can be used as a warning. It's foreign to me. My mum only uses my name as a warning when I'm glancing too longingly at knives and inks and so many different ways to hurt. My mum rarely leaves me alone. My mum makes my name sound like a disease, sometimes. Like the disease that's infiltrated my mind and takes up my life.

He makes it sound like I've done something terrible. Maybe I have.

"Right. Of course. Well, then." I say, knowing it's dumb to argue, now. It wouldn't work, would just anger us both. 

I shrug my beanie onto my head, tug my bag across my back, and waddle out of the classroom with a sigh.