Shattered

I wandered through a world of noise, 

Where silence used to scream. 

Each echo told a tale undone, 

Each shadow held a painful wound.

My heart longs for belonging and safety. The faces I pass blur into one endless crowd. Everyone seemed to know who they were and where they were supposed to be. Here I stood still, unable to move a muscle. Letting the world rush past me, wondering whether I will learn to move like them. In the end, the noise never became familiar. I remained a foreigner, and it stayed foreign to me. Its sharp edges cutting through every moment I try to hold on to. 

I learned too soon that dreams are a luxury, 

Life does not wait. 

The stars forgot to shine, 

Even the man on the moon turned away.

There was a time when I believed in things. A time when I believed that every star in the sky was shining just for me. I believed in small things: birthday wishes, coins tossed into fountains and dandelion seeds floating away with whispered hopes. This wishful thinking required a kind of innocence that seems to have slipped out of my hands before I even understood what it meant to have it. The starry night became just a sky. Dark, empty and indifferent to my desire to see it shine again. I’d look up hoping to see something, feel something, anything but the stars looked away. And the moon, my old companion and guide for lonely Haitian children, turned his face from me, even it knew I was beyond repair. 

I skipped years of scraped-up knees, 

Of laughter in the sun. 

Played grown-up in a broken world, 

Before my time came. 

Other children were learning to ride bikes and sharing secrets at sleepovers. I was learning how to survive. While other children were drowning in their parents' love, I was learning a different kind. I learned to read a room. How to make my voice smaller. How to calculate the weight of life. I became fluent in the kind of language that others don’t have to start learning until they are adults. There were no training wheels for the lessons I learned. No gentle introduction, just a sudden, harsh slap into a reality that didn’t care whether I was ready for it. 

The kind of love you only hear about,

But never see stay.

Four walls cold and gray,

Nothing in, nothing out.

I learned about love from books and movies. It would be a lie if I couldn’t admit the jealous ache I feel watching other families through the same pair of eyes I watched mine fall apart. Love seems like a myth, a fairy tale meant for other people. The love I knew was always temporary and one wrong move away from vanishing. Or maybe it was never there at all, and I was just holding on to emptiness. The walls around my heart grew higher and stronger; they keep everything out. They also keep me trapped inside alone with the echo of my own heartbeat. 

I read of catching children,

Before they slipped away.

But no one stood the rye for me,

No hands to hold, no names to call.

I search for answers and I search for someone, anyone who would understand me. Holden Caulfield and his dream of saving children from falling off the cliff, of keeping them safe in their innocence. I understood that dream so deeply it hurt. Understanding that dream also meant that I knew I’d already fallen. There was no Catcher at the edge waiting for me. I fell alone, in silence and no one came looking for me. By the time I had landed, I was someone, something different. Someone older, harder, colder and more careful than anyone should have to be. 

A swing that never swayed.

A childhood I can almost touch,

Touched memories with trembling hands,

Each one too faint to kiss.

There is a playground in my mind; I visit it sometimes in my loneliest moments. It has swings, slides and all the typical pieces of a normal childhood. But when I reach out, nothing moves. The swings hang still, the slides lead nowhere, the sandbox is empty. I stand in the middle of this frozen scene, close enough to touch but never close enough to have. I get to stand there and see what I missed, knowing that it only exists as a shadow in my mind. A ghost of a life I was supposed to live, but never got to do so.