The Timeline: a Reprise

From the moment I was born I was considered a miracle One month premature with so many things wrong Many considered me a fighter, and I suppose I was What they didn't realise is that the fight would continue At the age of eleven I left for secondary school Leaving behind the world of play for the world of work But I never much cared for play, only finding praise When I brought home the top grades At the age of thirteen I realised something was wrong Spending countless days trying to figure out why Why I liked girls and boys, why I struggled in class But mostly why I didn't want to wake up each day At the age of fourteen I had begun the biggest fight One that would last for plenty of years, always ongoing With angry red lines on my arms, and thoughts of suicide Always echoing around my head, I battled on By fifteen I realised the one I thought I loved Never loved me back, he saw me as his possession One to do with what he pleased and throw me aside But I found someone with gentle kisses to help me grow By sixteen those gentle kisses had turned to violet bruises Ones that reminded me of the emotional bruises on my mum It seemed that life had given up on the little girl fighting for her life The world grew darker in my head every day By eighteen I was ready to finally leave the world behind To move away and start fresh, becoming a new person But the darkness in my head was to follow me Proving that every year would be consumed in sadness By nineteen I had turned to drugs, but not the ones I thought Antidepressants made the world a shade of grey No longer the black I was used to, but not yet the white That I have been longing to achieve So now at twenty-one I am thinking about who I was Finding my old poetry that reads like a journal of the past Of a girl scared and screaming for someone to help Not believing she had the strength to help herself But now she stands stronger than ever Every day not quite as hard and the last Looking forward to a future she knows she can have Looking back on a past she knows she can overcome