Everything Else Looks Like Smoke
I keep hearing people say:
“my life is so hard”
and I want to hand them my Thursday.
I want to hand them the sound of a head against a wall,
hard enough that everyone freezes,
hard enough that the hallway forgets how to breathe.
I want to hand them crisis teams,
group homes,
kids carrying lives bigger than their bodies,
students learning how to survive
before they ever learned how to be children.
I fear for the ones
whose names stay in my head long after the bell rings.
The ones I worry about over the weekend.
The ones with no home to go back to.
The ones getting hurt where they’re supposed to be safe.
The ones pulled into things too dark, too dangerous, too adult
for kids who still should be worrying about homework and prom and who likes them back.
The ones getting arrested on Saturday
while everyone else is posting pictures with friends.
The ones who walk into my room Monday morning
and I quietly think,
“Thank God you’re here.”
Because to other people these stories sound shocking.
Extreme.
Terrifying.
But somewhere along the way
they became my normal.
And maybe that’s the thing that’s scaring me most.
Because now I go online
and people are falling apart
because someone was rude to them,
because they had a bad day,
because life felt unfair for a minute.
And I feel angry.
Not because I think pain should be a competition.
Not because I think people don’t deserve to hurt.
But because I want to shake them and say:
Do you know how lucky you are?
You get to go home to your mother.
You get to call your father.
You get to have someone care where you are.
You get to know where you’re sleeping tonight.
Do you know how many kids I know
would give anything for that?
And then I hate myself a little
for feeling that way.
Because their pain is still pain.
Their problems are still problems.
I know that.
I know that.
But after standing so close to fires every day,
sometimes everything else looks like smoke.
And I think the truth is this:
I don’t think I lost empathy.
I think I got buried under everyone else’s suffering
and forgot what normal looked like.
And now I’m standing at a doorway
with one hand still reaching backward.
Because I love these kids enough
that leaving feels like betrayal.
I keep thinking:
who worries about them if I don’t?
Who checks if they’re okay Monday morning?
Who notices when they’re quiet?
Who remembers the things they don’t say?
But maybe loving people
doesn’t mean setting yourself on fire beside them.
Maybe sometimes loving people
means believing they’ll keep going
even after you let go of their hand.