She had tears for breakfast,

The salt leaving her tongue parched.

In a world full of hate,

Hatred of self was the first uninvited guest.

Feelings of inadequacy overflow,

The dam protecting her heart

Broken by none other than herself.

Nourished by playing with perfect dolls,

Media only had to prick her finger

To shatter her ideas of self

And prevent her thoughts

From extending past the surface.

Of all losses,

The loss of oneself is perhaps

The most blurred.

Because to not know who you are

Is to become a shadow of the world.

A clone without humanity

And no certainty of recovery.

Once upon a time, she was a child.

Pure and innocent.

Loved by all who saw her,

Seen as nothing but a lovely blond girl,

A princess in the making.

It was only a matter of time before

She was tired of her sandbox and of her playhouse.

Overcome with the desires to burn her pretend castle

And cry her imperfect tears all over it.

Everyone told her to treasure this time.

She grew out of her dresses and dolls.

And in her grief,

Turned her interests to destruction.

For she, caught up in who she could have been, was a mourner,

One who was advised to always, always smile.

She was real, not some fictional princess.

Instead of saving her people,

She held them capture.

Opposed to protecting her fragile castle,

She lit the fire herself.

And to think,

All it took was

One.

Struck.

Match.

She was defiant,

A real go-getter.

She was blaze in the Arctic.

Fueled by crushed hopes.

She was an explosion.

She was the grenade

That started this whole mess.

Feet pound the pavement

Searching for something wild

The noises of machines fill her ears

But she wants to go where the hummingbirds are

She sprints through openings in glass and stone

Only to find herself more trapped than before

Those gadgets make her sick

She only wants to heal

Run through the city and pass the border

Now she is lost but she will find her way

She veers off the road

Into the woods she goes

It is among the trees where she can finally breathe

The grass is a rug on her child toes

Here she can walk without the need to rush

Time is nonexistent

You need only find the place

The water drips

As my sheets crinkle around my legs

The fan whirrs in the corner

And snores echo from the rooms down the hall

Reaching crescendos and falling again

Out of rhythm

The reality of the day hits me

While I peel off my cracked nail polish

The air seems too clean for this place

This city

This nation

This corrupt world

The country is the land of the stars

Of late nights spent in pickup trucks

I used to worry about my future

Now I am scared for today

Career anguishes faded into doubts about

Even getting into college

The city is deafening in its influential advertisements

Instilling the belief of being one as being the same

I do not understand why everyone desires

To be the same

Should I have to want this, too?

Feathers waltz in the wind

Why am I not dancing?

I have always wanted the same thing

I’m probably too boring for this world

There’s someone standing in the corner

Watching over them

I don’t care

I’d rather be in the light

In the end, we can agree and disagree

Is it really that big of a deal?

They say I have amnesia – retrograde amnesia, to be exact. I cannot remember anything that happened to me before waking up to sunlight on my face and a boy screaming. They say he is my brother; I don’t remember.

Someone slipped up one day, a guy around my age named Elijah. He was telling me how we were friends and that I lost my memory because of an ischemic stroke. I had tried to interfere in a fight between my prom date and my ex-boyfriend, Oliver, – “Classic Alice,” Elijah had said then – and my ex had shoved me out of the way a little too hard. That was when I collapsed, though it wasn’t just from the shove. I had started speaking ‘gibberish’ before the fight broke out, but it had all happened so quickly that my friends didn’t have time to be concerned. I stumbled between the guys before the coincidental moment.

Because it wasn’t my lack of balance or inability to speak that had me brought to the hospital, it was the blood streaming down my split lip. I was lucky that Oliver had shoved me, otherwise it would have been longer before I had gotten help.

I’m lucky; I know I am. I have only been in the hospital for six days and I can already remember traces of the confusion I felt during the fight. The feeling of my feet floating in air before being grabbed back to the ground. The people dancing around me in a circle.

The thing is: that’s not all I remember. I have had brief flashes of an angular face yelling at me, grabbing my arms so that red crescent moons were left behind on pallid skin. Dark hair – my hair – flying around my arms only to be pulled behind me, yanking on my scalp.

I may not remember everything right now, but I know that I don’t want to. I think something bad happened before prom, and I’m not certain anyone else knows, except for Oliver. Because, it is his face that I see (according to the pictures brought to me), and, as desperately as my family and Elijah want me to regain my memory, I can’t bring myself to want the same. People bringing in pictures from before makes my situation worse – because it’s helping. This current guilt is nothing compared to the pain from the past.

The more my memory comes back, the more I treasure my amnesia. It doesn’t make any sense except to say that I am beginning to believe that I am too weak to handle the truth of my life. I am terrified, and I can’t remember feeling a similar emotion except for in my lost memories that are beginning to not feel so lost.