By GRACE ESCOE
I have never understood the want to
Live forever
Be ever young
To never age
Evergreen
When I was little
I would collect my birthdays
Every second of every minute of every day
Like porcelain dolls to put into a cabinet
I used to be proud of having lived through another year
It was also a collection of sorts
In a way like trophies
To show off
What I had survived
Maybe a better analogy is how people keep
Their tumors in glass jars after surgery
To show
What they had to survive
What they were once up against
I almost like to compare each year to a shard of glass
Yet I cannot decide if I take more delight
In the years that cut the deepest
Or the sections of them
That I spent sewing stitches
And bringing myself back out of those ditches
Years that skimmed my heart’s bulging surface
That almost punctured it
Used to give me hope
You see,
I used to see death
As winning
Some people say
Sometimes life cuts too deep
At first, I thought that was what I was experiencing
Yet what was originally something to exacerbate
The pain
Became an end all be all
Like death usually is, I guess
I got satisfaction from the idea of looking down
Instead of always up
Seeing above the branches
Seeing all those I knew
Seeing the sun
Morning my absence
Because they did not seem to care much for my presence
So eventually my birthday became something that taunted me
Another year deeper into my childhood
Another year to swallow
Like gulping down air
Yet never exhaling
Just keeping it all inside
So when I heard
Laughter is the best medicine
I would sit up each night
Trying with all my might to push the air out
But I never seemed to heal
But no matter how hard I tried
To thrive
I sat in silence
People sang to the night
With different reverberates of twisted tunes
Ones that came from the bottom of their stomachs
Some that just sat on top of the heart
I failed to even hum the key
Tone deaf
I eventually gave up
The first time I laughed
I did not recognize that the sound
Had come from myself
My best friend stopped me that day
Tears almost on her face
She told me that she had never heard me laugh before
Barely even smile
Yet laughter did not dissemble the dark clouds
No it finally let the rain fall
The realization that unhappiness
Had depicted my life for years
And it sang me to sleep that night
Apparently silence sat deep in my bones
I was the last one of my siblings to ever say a word
My parents thought it was because I had so many thoughts
That I simply forgot to say any of them out loud
That or the fact that my older sister talked so much
That I never got the chance to do so myself
They put me in speech therapy just in case
But that did not change the nature
The survival instinct
Of staying quiet
It was as if I knew the power of words
Before I even learned to speak
I learned to listen
So it was no surprise that I reverted to that
Again and again
Like a sinners knees on a wooden
Church floor
Or a deer drinking from a stream
Not a noise or a ripple made
So it was no surprise that
People called me the one that never speaks
There were three girls with my name
In school
I was labeled the quiet one
I drew comfort in that fact
Because I had learned all too well the dangers
Of taking up too much space
One that hides behind things
That become smaller
Is a harder target
The quietest in the forest
Do not exactly thrive
But again
Despite my wants and desires
I did what I had to do
To survive
Because the quietest in the forest
Are prey
So maybe life to me
What I thought life was
Fear
The will
The meaning
To live
Never being so ever clear
On my eighteenth birthday
Something shifted
The plagued tissue
Within my lungs
I learned to exhale
A prerequisite for laughter
This time when I fell
I made a ripple in the water
A step on a branch
Yet I am still here
With my cracked porcelain dolls
And jars full of old habits
I still have years that sting
That dig too deep
And years that stitches have been swallowed into
But I carry these scars all the same
Maybe this time with a little pride
Because I survived
Every second of every minute of every hour
Of every type of day
Writer | Grace Escoe ’26 | gescoe26@amherst.edu
Editor | Lila Schlissel ’27 | lschlissel27@amherst.edu