Chapter 10: Moon blanched landscape

I looked at the clock whilst taking another gulp of whiskey. Four in the morning. Normally I'd be tucked up in bed. That isn't an option tonight. I don't know if it will ever be an option again. I don't think I can sleep with Hannah's voice reverberating through my mind.

Looking back, I stopped writing poetry in my notebook when I stopped wanting to know myself anymore.

If you hear a song that makes you cry and you don't want to cry anymore you don't listen to that song anymore.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore.

I wish you could. Then I wouldn't have to feel the pain, the guilt, the shame. I wouldn't be forcing myself to listen to the voice of a girl I killed. I wouldn't need to get to the end.

So, here you go Ryan Shaver. The truth will set you free.

The Lost-N-Found. Always an entertaining mix of doodles, photos and other random items which Ryan has found lying around. And I know where this is going. The poem he published. The poem he 'found'. The one we discussed in English class. The one we dissected. The one the other kids mocked. The one I ran a lesson on. She wrote it. She must have. None of us knew it was her, but she wrote it. And then had to listen as we repeatedly read it aloud, as we dissected it and cut it into pieces.

The third week, we took the biggest chance of all and handed each other our entire notebooks of poems.

Wow! That took a lot of courage. For me definitely.

And he betrayed you. One more person in a long line of people to betray you. Justin took your reputation, Jessica took your friendship and your trust, Tyler took your safety and security and ensured you never saw the stars from your window again. Courtney used your insecurity in her little popularity contest, Marcus took advantage of you and Zach, well Zach took what was left. But Ryan went one stage further. Ryan took your heart and soul and held it up for public ridicule. You trusted him with your innermost thoughts and he betrayed you. How many of us did that?

You found it, Ryan. You found the hidden meaning. You found what even I couldn't find in my own poem.

The poem wasn't about my mum you said. Or a boy. It was about me. I was writing a letter to myself…hidden in a poem.

You told me that no boy was overlooking me more than I was overlooking myself. At least that's what you thought it meant. And that's why you asked me what it meant. You felt it went deeper than even you could figure out.

I can remember the poem word for word. I read it aloud so many times to different classes. We analysed it. None of us were even close.

Why did you steal my notebook? Why did you print my poem, the poem that you yourself called 'scary' in the Lost-N-Found? Why did you let other people read it?

Because he was stupid. Because he didn't think. Because he's a teenager. And he could never have thought that an English teacher would leap on it with such enthusiasm and dissect it in the classroom, allowing the other students to cut it up and try to find the truth below. He could never have foreseen one English teacher deciding that this would make an excellent set of lesson plans and would share the idea with all the other teachers. That the other teachers would leap on it in the same way and it would become part of the curriculum. He could never have thought that one English teacher would decide to openly compare this poem to one written by the dead classics authors whilst the actual author was in the room. The author who was already suicidal.

At the time it made sense. We didn't know who had written it. So just like those dead authors of old we couldn't ask them about its meaning, we had the freedom to analyse it without contradiction and there were no right or wrong answers. That's what I thought. I had no idea how wrong I was.

Some even wrote parodies of my poem, reading them out to me in the hopes of getting under my skin.

It was all so stupid and childish…and cruel.

I didn't know that. I never realised. I never saw. Another thing that I missed in a list that is growing far too long.

School hadn't been a safe haven of mine for a long time. And after your photo escapades Tyler, my home was no longer secure.

Now, suddenly, even my own thoughts were being offered up for ridicule.

I should have seen it. I should have noticed. Hannah is blaming Ryan, but yet again, for another time this evening, the blame lies squarely on my own two shoulders. Ryan betrayed her. But I was the teacher. It was my class. The buck stops with me. Again.

The poem floats around in my head. In her voice this time. Not mine.

I meet your eyes

you don't even see me

You hardly respond

when I whisper

hello

Could be my soul mate

two kindred spirits

Maybe we're not

I guess we'll never

know

My own mother

carried me in you

Now you see nothing

but what I wear

People ask you

how I am doing

You smile and nod

don't let it end

there

Put me

underneath God's sky and

know me

don't just see me with your eyes

Take away

this mask of flesh and bone and

see me

for my soul

alone

I was impressed because most of the teenage poetry I get handed is simply angsty and depressive. Some of its very talented, but it's all the same. This was different. Some of the stuff is based around self-harm, a lot is based around suicide. Dark angels and blood stained tears are frequent metaphors. Probably the most disturbing is the stuff that's based around anorexia. In fact one of the few teenage poems I have lodged in my mind is one that was written about anorexia. It had been handed in for marking and I couldn't mark it. It wasn't technically perfect, but the cry for help was so clear, the distress so obviously resounded from the page in front of me. And I couldn't mark it. I couldn't treat it like I'd treated all the others:

It's all in the name of perfection

That I do this to myself.

I'm so afraid of rejection

That I reject myself.

My reflection, my tormentor

It laughs back at me.

It shows me who I really am

Not who I want to be.

I didn't want it as a tormentor

I wanted it as a friend,

I thought I knew how to get this,

My weight had to descend.

So, in the name of perfection

So, in the name of self-worth,

I began my own destruction

And mistook it for re-birth.

How can you mark something like that? And it's why Hannah's poem impressed me so much. It was so much more fluid and could have so many potential meanings without being stereotypically 'teenage' in its make-up. It was gentle and powerful at the same time, somehow reminding me of a breath of wind that has the potential to become a tornado. In a way I suppose that's exactly what it did become. It was like looking behind the layers of protection and barriers that have been constructed and being able to see the soul beyond them.

But thinking about that has made me remember another poem that was left in my pigeon hole. I never did figure out who had written it. Then Hannah died and I forgot to look anymore. It was darker than the one that I used in the lessons, but no less powerful. But instead of being a looking glass to a fragile and breaking soul, the only way I can describe it is being given a single glance of the fear, pain and broken glass that litters a soul and not being able to look anymore. It had none of the gentle beauty, instead was frightening in its intensity and power. But something about Hannah's poem has brought it out from the murky recesses of my memory. Perhaps the similarities in theme. The feeling that nobody is willing to really look and see what is underneath the perfection of the surface.

I shatter
Dissolve within myself.
Swirl like flotsam in the ebb of childhood dreams
of what I hope are nightmares
and flung free
from thoughts too bad to last.
Caught within the swell of seething summer nights
beside a bloodless, dark massed sea
I cannot forget. I cannot fight
my memories.
I trip, and cut myself on jagged fragments of my past.
I writhe in the grip of half remembered pain.
And only in not being find relief
And only in dying can atone.
No one can understand
You cannot know
How much you hurt me with your disbelief,
Or how thoughts of self-destruction scheme
Whether I am with you or alone.
No matter how untouched and bright they seem
I am forever tarnished by their sin.
I cannot show
How desperate I feel, and how afraid.
You do not notice how I note each blade
You do not see me eye the passing cars
You do not see the long dug trenches or the scars
Where ignorant armies grind
In slow and graceless wars
Across the moon blanched landscape of my mind.

Perhaps the fact that I might have more than one student who is really struggling.

Perhaps the fact that this time I might be able to make a difference.