lost in translation

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Dear prejudice,

If you could see the entirety of her thoughts, you would believe in the universe's infinite capacity. See the stars hidden behind the city pollution, the tendrils of the clouds as they entwined with the aurora lights, where the moon did not just pull the tide but asteroids and matter to its orbit.

If you could capture the running trains she catered, perpetually moving tracks pulling apart and conjoining at the edges, the passengers—ideas unkempt, unsolved, incomplete—the vehicles carried would trample over your stop lights, you would fall down the road with your ragged converse and pinched hoodie as you fought to keep pace with the speed of activity not willing to offer a hand.

If you could grasp onto the railings before you fell through the caverns disintegrating the mountains you're sitting on, you'd find even the clouds too busy aggregating the downpour of anxiety and bliss. You would be awed by the way she struggled to keep the sanity she seemed to find evaporating when she didn't remember to water it.

If you could watch the slanders after watching her expose the art she couldn't canvas into reality, watch them shred with claws—pierce with their talons—through the fabric of her mind like it wasn't delicate; watch, with doe eyes and a dark grimace, the way they shot bullets with a gun no one should be licensed, then you would also see the imponderable strings of her armour strangle the words before they could hurt their creator anymore.

If you could touch the shards, wispy objects that were light to the touch of your gentle fingertips, you would remember what it was like to feel like the world was not so unforgiving and vast, when you, yourself, are far too abundant in a realm of boundaries. You would be reminded that the horizon was not a limit to the earth, and the sky shouldn't be for you.

If you could be taught without a syllabus and a unit test slapped with a percentage, you would be taught that your worth was not pushed into a decimal number, that a fraction could not supply the right weight of your value. You would understand that you could offer more than they could take from you, like she tried to show you with her battle scars.

If only you could learn in the most unadulterated sort of lessons that shouldn't ever be confined to the four walls of a classroom or caution tape to stairs that only head towards dreams not too far away. If only you could learn like she, who fights to show others that even unconventional, brilliance is not just memorization and facts. Brilliance is not just textbook and equations.

If only you could see that you are brilliant, like the moon and the trains and the railings and the armour. If only you could see that to suffer the world's misunderstanding because your brilliance lost in translation would not be tolerated.

If only you could see that you were brilliant, radiant, speechless.

If only you could see that you and her were not so different after all.

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