Contrast

We were born in high contrast. We wake up in twin beds in pitch corners of cramped rooms, we arise from queen canopies on the top of the pyramid, we sit with straight backs on dark mornings in when the sun hasn't risen yet, we wish we never had to wake up again because in our minds, the sun will never come up, we choke down granola bars then lean over toilets to make them come back , we say goodbye to parents that look at us each and every day and never notice. We have always lived in high contrast. We make our older boyfriends with cars pick us up a block away because we can't bear the idea of them seeing our defeated homes, we check the morning news on bright white iPhones and nine year old Dell computers on the edge of death, we giggle sharply as we glide through Starbucks drive-throughs with venti lattes in hand, we ride buses that let themselves in to gated subdivisions that smell like freshly mowed grass and pink roses, we stand at bus stops on run-down ends of run-down streets and we watch teenage monsters in bright blue Mercedes roll past stop signs the way they rolled past our protests and held us down. The future is high contrast. We play with Cartier bracelets while we daydream through lectures, we improvise duct-taped solutions to binders and backpacks that are falling apart at the seams because eight dollars an hour isn't enough for anything, we kick at our lockers and scuff them up with the rage at the lies we were told, we stare at the boys standing by the ATM machine and wonder if they honestly think money prints straight out off the press on demand, we put our heads down and try to make it through. We know nothing but high contrast. We sit in bed and write slam poetry about all the things we wish we could change, we consider the conceit of expecting people to hear us, we think about how the simple act of writing our lives can mean so many things at once, we stare at blank documents that we never wanted to fill, we press Publish with the knowledge that nobody is listening. We will die in high contrast.