For MJ, my Melody was once my Joy

I, am angry.

And you know,
 not all of us have the iron skin of the three hundred spartans who stood against the persian hordes all alone all on their own.
While you laugh and smile alongside your comrades there are those of us who scream ourselves to sleep at night,
wondering when the next bottle of pills
The next dose of drugs,
The next hateful word
will be thrown at us with a veiled contempt only we seem to be condemned to see.
And the thoughts that follow make me angry,
 angry with the world and it’s kaleidoscope of colours and insults,
 born from the hatred and pain caused by others,
 congealed into a merry-go-round of tears spilt and lives lost.

I once knew a girl who wanted to be a boy,
 and he was every colour imaginable,
Though uncomfortable in his own skin like a snake waiting to molt,
 And those hateful boys and girls saw right through him,
poking and prodding with the spears they had sharpened using a caustic combination of low
self esteem and malicious envy,
 they whittled down the foundations of the walls he had built and those walls ultimately became his downfall, and in his eyes there were ghost towns hidden in the ghosts of frowns from days long past where his memory will forever last.

He’s been dead now for years, that boy took his own life because he couldn’t handle the overwhelming,
 unrelenting torrent of darkness stemmed only by the feeling of a razor blade dragged so deep across his body that the only thing he could hear besides his screams of anguish was that of his own blood dripping onto the tiled floor.
 But while those boys and girls only had spears, that boy had a hand grenade in the form of his life, with a blast so large it could have been mistaken for a nuclear bomb
 causing third degree burns taken in turns in a vain attempt to hide what we did or didn’t say…
The fallout from that explosion will last for a lifetime.

There is a saying that sticks and stones can break our bones,
But in the end it’s a decision like his that shatters our hearts with the pieces scattering so far and wide that we will never have a hope of being the whole person we used to be because there is a hole in our soul where that person once filled and
 one might say that’s his legacy.

I, was in love with that boy.