Fool

Poor, poor you, unable to assist yourself;
All alone- are you not old enough to be so?
There are none to help you,
How can you wish for otherwise?
Even with this knowledge, you've made yourself a fool:
This sort of thing, at your age, makes you quite the ass.*
If you can't confine yourself,
Continue to cry, perhaps all the harder: you're not worth the effort.

*I hesitate to use the term "ass" here, due to it's modern connotation as a profanity, but I use it here in reference to a donkey- I.E., in the older connotation.


I hadn't planned on making a fool out myself and trapping myself within a room of people five to three years younger than me, crying, yet I did. (I should have foreseen the event, what with my own strange, apathetic manner in the minutes beforehand). I waited until most of the happy children exited and tried to make my escape as well, but by some cruel chance (likely a subconscious desire to receive pathetic empathy), Mrs. Jacobs spotted me.

I did want to talk to her, like she kept ensuring me I could. But I couldn't: a forty year-old woman cannot be the best friend to a sixteen year-old. A forty-year old can not fill the void within my life that cannot be filled because I am old and the people my age are young and hate my oldness. Not only that, but I'd made a pathetic enough spectacle of myself, and Mrs. Jacobs was due to go out with another teacher- someone her age, that blessed being. I did want to be a baby and throw off her plans, or, at least, the childish side of me I can't bear desired such. Instead, I stood silent, trying my hardest to cry in a catatonic way. I have a feeling it worked.

Then I did, in fact, depart, accompanied by a girl one year my senior who Mrs. Jacobs felt should look after me. She saw me to where my mom was; To where my red face and glassy eyes incriminated me.

So it goes.