Tenderness

It began with name calling

at elementary school, “Smarty-Pants”,

“Goody-Goody,” simple, derogatory terms mutating

over the months and years to harsher terms,

more derogatory, hurtful, hateful terms

and personal attacks because, well,

because others were using them,

and their friends, too, so you had to,

to fit in, unaware of the pain of the jokes

you didn’t understand, pain you didn’t feel.

And even when you did understand, years later,

in middle school, and later still, high school,

where fitting in was much more important,

it morphed to the meanness of high school cruelty

where she was told it was only the drama of high school

students’ interacting, part of growing up,

this high school drama, and the unintended bullying

of teachers, “deal with it,” and adults,

who don’t understand, who forgot the pain

of dealing with it. It all lacks feeling, this fear,

this pain of living, even the pain of a bladed edge digging

through tender flesh just to feel something, anything

real and tangible, a pain she deserved found in self-esteem

gone shallow, undeserving of little else but this.

And there’s no one there to understand the needs

she won’t disclose because they can’t be met, “never”

in a world begun with a single name called

that she carries with her, anxious and afraid,

longing only for what she could have, could be

if someone understood her enough to end the pain, the drama,

and replace it with love, the love she can’t feel now,

or know. This love is sharper than any bladed edge,

a love to make her feel the worth she’s always had,

a worth hidden by an unkind word said in ignorance

and isolation in the halls of a school building

set in her past, a setting she can’t escape

without the love or understanding she can’t find,

this blade that will keep her alive, cutting through her fear

to the tenderness hidden within that longs to come out,

that says “this is me … love me … just as I am.”