A Lie Well Lived Poem by Kimberly Hope

You walk around the school as if your life is perfect, a fantasy, and you're utterly happy. You make up exciting stories to tell your friends, and your peers in order to make your home life sound well and adventurous. Thus allowing you to feel good, special, even loved for a couple of hours every day. You dread returning home every day after school, especially on Friday's; where you have to live two full days at the house. Every morning, you arise before everybody else; eating and hoping not to be caught, for you dread whichever punishment you'd be forced to face.Taking a shower coldly, without a towel, hoping not to disrupt the flow, then dashing off to school for your pleasant lie well lived. Upon returning home, your mother is drunk, and your father is even more drunk, you clean up after them, rushing to finish before your bed time, and shoving away your father from your young virgin
body; wishing to be back in school, where life is happy. The scolding hot water burns your hands, and bleach eat at your hands. Working fast to clean the dishes, and mop up the muddy, alcoholic floors. You try to tell them how much it hurts, but they only yell at you to stop
acting like a child. So at night when you're all alone, you cry your eyes out, all along wishing that someone, anyone knew you enough, even cared enough to rescue you. You think once again about telling your favorite teacher, but then decide not to, for your consequences
could be deadly. And yet somehow, in some alternate universe you still manage to love mother and father enough to keep their secret.