a spoken word poem

1. When someone first calls you smart, it feels like a gift. On top of the world sort of feeling, fingers curled sort of feeling, life unfurled sort of feeling. In a split second you are impossible and impermeable — unreachable and unbreachable — fingertips grazing the horizon with the universe cradled in the palm of your hands. You think you finally know what they meant when they called it a realm of possibilities.
2. Gifted kid work is easy. It means skipping math class on Mondays and gradeless projects in a room destined for genius. There is little time to be worried. Save it, they tell you, for when it comes a little later in life.
3. Newsflash: It comes sooner rather than later.
4. Middle school isn’t too bad — sure, the accusations of nerd and show off plague your person and stalk your shadow, but you brush them off. It’s all too easy to hide in the sunshine than extend a hand to the solitude. People ask you how you are. You adjust the back-breaking pressure of a thousand-weighted gaze, a thousand weighted grades and tell them you are fine. Papers on papers on papers. You’re fine. Pressure on pressure on pressure. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine.
5. By high school, you have learned to ignore the safety breaks. There are a mountain of messes piling up inside your mind. But you’re fine and for every haunt in your head there are ten thousand more homework pages, half-filled cups, and half-brained worries sitting on your bedside table.
6. The word smart becomes less of a blessing and more of a curse. Tastes worse as it fills and stains the mouth like day-old breath gone dry. Takes a while to sink in, but like a parasite it sticks to teeth, braves the heat, and feeds, gnawing at the scraps of self confidence buried in the back of your body and in the bitterness of your bones. It was thrown around too often in elementary school. So often that it has become a hand-me down — once cherished and long perished. A ragged promise of potential lost among the jagged pencils and torn sneakers of the lost and found bin.
7. Every decimal and variable is a vacuum of boundless validation. No grade A is satisfactory to the starving and insatiable hunger that thrives in your stomach. Society has tipped you onto a roller coaster that keeps going up and, by now, the highs don’t feel like success, but, boy, do the falls feel like failure
8. If you had a price tag, you think, your GPA would be at the very top — spelled out in black bold numbers. You hope any customer willing to think you’re worth their while will ignore the fine print that reads Warning: brilliance expires soon
9. You become your own slave. Chained to your desk by day, your neglect by night and by the time you learn that the eyes pinned to your spine weren’t real, you realize they were mirrors — reflecting the mocking monsters that maul at the memory of your merit and claw at every crevice of your sanity
10. They ask you how you are and a dam crashes down on a storm of self-inflicted stresses. Your application reads — one word to describe myself: smart — and this time it only takes a second for you to swallow the bowling-ball sized brick wall trapped in your grade A-lined lungs. You tell them you are fine.