Misfit…

You sit on the edge while the others belong,
Feeling the difference but unsure what is wrong.
While home is a battlefield, violent and loud,
And shadows of abuse hide away from the crowd. 
You build up a fortress of counting and prayer,
To master the chaos that no child should bear.
Yet deep underneath, in the dirt and the grit,
The fact hits you raw: you just never quite fit.

Your emotions are storms that strike sudden and fast,
A skinless existence too heavy to last.
You crave every friendship, then push it away,
A mimic-child acting a part through the day.
Just mirroring others so when they look back,
They see a normal girl, set on a normal track.
An unnamable terror, though you didn't yet know,
It was BPD planting its seeds far below.

You missed all the lessons of schoolyard and youth,
Too lost and too lonely to look at the truth.
No drug education, no help by your side,
Just desperate for anything where you could hide. 
To quiet the trauma, to close up the door,
On memories crashing too hard on the floor.
At fifteen you stumble, a child in the dark,
And heroin leaves its indelible mark.

Waking in pain and in jittery sweat,
With no one to tell you the price of the debt.
By the time someone warns you, you're locked in your fate,
Addiction has you gripped and it’s far too late.
The scramble for cash and the chase of the fix,
While your body and years got lost in the mix.
A life stolen so young with no one to pull through,
Just enduring the best that a broken child knew. 

By the time you hit bottom, more dead than alive,
You clung to the only thing left: to survive.
And when you got clean, the long childhood had fled,
With years swallowed up by the war in your head.
No carefree old games, no normal routine,
No motherly love or comfort to be seen. 
No father offering a guiding hand,
Just an upbringing you had to withstand. 

Had someone just paused, looked you over, and stayed,
And asked if you're okay, while you withered and frayed. 
Just one simple question to pierce through the night,
To see that a child was expiring from sight.
Maybe you’d have learnt your disorders names,
With someone to step in to extinguish the flames. 
If just one person had taken the time to care,
I could have been a very different Clare.