“Thirteen to Fifteen”
It started before I had the words
to tell someone I was drowning.
Thirteen,
and the world taught me
that innocence is not a shield—
not when eyes turn into knives,
not when hands reach through glass
and take
what was never given.
They came through a screen.
Pixels and predators.
Smiles and sickness.
And I was still trying to figure out
who I was,
when they decided for me.
They stripped me of silence,
then blamed me for the noise.
Said I invited it.
Said I wanted it.
Like consent was written
in the way I existed.
I became a museum of bruises
no one could see.
I laughed in class,
but it echoed wrong—
a mimic of who I used to be.
Friends started vanishing.
Not into new schools
or different lives—
but into the air.
Gone.
No goodbyes.
Three funerals.
Three shadows burned into my chest
where hope used to sleep.
I stopped counting the times
I tried to leave too.
Not for attention.
But because living
felt like punishment
for a crime I didn’t commit.
I wrote notes
I never sent.
Tried pills,
tried silence,
tried rope in a dream I was glad I woke from.
I saw my name on a headstone in my mind
and it didn’t scare me.
It felt like rest.