Trust Issues That I Wish You Saw

I wrote a little paper on anglerfish in primary school – my science homework. I spent an entirety of my nine-year-old evening – which are notoriously longer than usual evenings – scribbling down roughly a thousand words. My mom printed out pictures for me and stuck them on A4 pieces of paper so I could get an A – all my nerdy self ever really aspired to, as if it could somehow fill me.

And you told me you forgot your little nine-year-old paper and asked me to present it together. I was your friend, so I said yes, and no sense in my body even hinted that I was aboard on a sinking ship.

Three years later when my other classmates pointed their twelve-year-old fingers at me and yelled “fat!” you did not take a twelve-year-old second to hesitate before turning to me to yell “ugly!”

When I first heard Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Scar Tissues I thought they were talking about trust issues in the bridge.

One eleven-year-old break time you approached me and we talked over juice and chocolate bars and I thought having a friend is like eating a warm, sweet pudding – innocent and enjoyable.

So when you told everyone about the boy a year older that I liked for everyone to laugh at how the ugliest creature can have feelings just like everyone else I thought to myself how having a friend is just like eating a warm pudding – and be diagnosed with diabetes after one spoonful.

“Trust issues that I wish you saw, sarcastic Mister Know-it-All”

I was changing my seven-year-old shoes once, and you approached me and sniffed one of my flats. Your seven-year-old face cringed and you yelled “You stink!”

And everyone laughed, and I swear it still echoes in my eighteen-year-old head.

I swear it still does.

And I swear you had so many faces over the years that I learned not to trust any of them.

So when he reached out his hand to me when I couldn’t stand up, of course I wanted to yell.

But I smiled instead.

because with the birds I won’t share this lonely view.