What is This 'Thing'?

By Brittany Barker, Age 15

Inspired by the November '08 Poetry Workshop, "Between Sustenance and Hunger"

Why does he always push me around?
No matter how much I try to hug him.

Have you ever felt like this?

I’m talking about love.
You know that thing you feel inside?
Like falling out of the front seat of the King Da Ka roller coaster at Six Flags?

Okay, I’m young.
I haven’t even considered marriage yet,
But I’ve been “divorced” four times.
I know how it feels.

I’m talking about young love.
You can’t run from it.
So I speak for all, and I ask you,
What is love?

We’ve all melted down to the core
For someone who continuously picked on us.
We’ve let them hurt us.

And even though we want to stick gum in their ears
And sock them in the face with a sack of oranges,
We restrain ourselves.
Because somehow we feel just a little bad about it.

But if I was a raging, crouching tiger
Cross-bred with a bull and a wild coyote,
I’d have a violent fit about it.

Instead,
I exhale the rage.
Woooo-sahhh!

Say it with me now:
Woooo-sahhh!

This reminds me of a time back in third grade
When this boy Jeremy bothered me every day.
I got suspended from school when he punched me
And we broke out into a kiddy brawl.

I could’ve sworn I hated him;
There was no love there at all.
Every time I looked into his beady little eyes,
It made my skin crawl.

Two weeks later, a classmate celebrated his birthday in school
And those little party bags were handed out.
Jeremy gave me the toy snake tail from his party bag.
Now, I ask you. Is that love?

It’s love when you’re five years old and that boy tripped you
And pushed you off the monkey bars.
It’s love when he spit on your new Nikes
On your birthday, without a single care at all.

And it’s definitely love
When you told him his Bob The Builder shirt is pretty nice
And he replied, “Shut up, Fatty!”
Now was that nice?

When we’re young …
Oh when we’re young
We mask our feelings,
Push them into a hidden compartment behind our hearts
Because this falling in love thing is new to us.

Gradually, we progress and mature,
At least girls do.
All of a sudden
We have to look good in front of them.
We go from sweaty fistfights in the summer sun
To spraying on Victoria’s Secret body mist by the ton.

And please, please do not let me get started
On the lip-gloss issue.
We gloss it up so much we can’t even part our lips.
We make Lil Mama too proud.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but when we’re in love,
We forget about everything else.
We are in that moment.

But soon we knock our heads against concrete ground
And stand up with bruises
Because that person we have so much love for
Didn’t catch us when we fell.

We were so wrapped up in it,
That we didn’t see that his feelings weren’t mutual.

We fall for all the wrong reasons, in all the wrong seasons.
We fall, just to get back up and do it one more time;
To take another chance,
To let love shield our eyes and make us blind.

Now, how do we grow to live with this?
Easy!

Step Number 1: Write about how much you hate love.
Step Number 2: Roll your eyes at any guy who tries to talk to you.
And step 3? Sing Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Woman” 50 times every morning.

All we need is ourselves, right?
Like Beyonce sings,
Me, myself and I is all I got in the end.

What I’m saying is,
We don’t have to be so quick to fall.
It’s okay to stumble,
But it’s even better to stand our ground and tolerate no BS at all.

Like Girls Write Now.
We stand firm as a community of female writers,
We embrace each other’s flaws.
(OK, so we have no flaws.)

We make it most evident that a pen or pencil is all we need
To make these heartless boys revolve.

Watch Brittany read on YouTube
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