By Avery Corey, TIWP Student

It’s an unseen mountain growing on your shoulders, 
grain by grain,
until even breathing feels like lifting stone.
The pressure stacks, 
threatening to crush me under its weight. 
It is impossible to break free,
clinging like a shadow welded to my heels,
following even when the sun is gone.
what if one can or will no longer stand strong?
If it ever crushed them, it would be glass under sudden weight,
a shatter that changes its form forever.

A weight laid on me by my surroundings,
one I never asked for,
never needed.
A wound carved by the knives they wield,
and it just keeps on bleeding.

What am I
without that shiny A that reflects back at me?
I try to be perfect,
but the letters keep drifting down like leaves from a dying tree,
slipping down a staircase built by me,
and without them, who am I supposed to be?
a hollow shell, a name with no meaning?
Is there any worth left in me,
or anything I’m meant to be?
It waits in the thoughts that consume me at night,
the questions people warn to leave down under,
the questions that all come to life during the thunder.

What if
I didn’t have to try anymore,
didn’t have to fake a smile, didn’t lie?
What if
I let everything go,
stopped pretending I still know
and let the silence pull me below?
What if
I let everyone down,
and in my tease
they watch me drown.
would they be displeased?