Raise the Flags

I’ve watched the nation and state flags be brought down to half mast on multiple days each year. During these days the high school student body and the staff take a small allotted amount of time to commemorate whatever tragedy, death, or sacrifice is being acknowledged; it’s during these days that I wail the most.

My voice echoes through the halls, down the stairwells and into the courtyards yet no one hears my cries. Though my body can no longer cry, I still feel as though I can feel hot tears streaming down my cheeks. I know it’s just a memory that I can’t shake. Phantom pain.

No one hears me or sees me. No one acknowledges my tragedy because it’s been kept hidden. The entirety of my existence has been forgotten, just another cold case added to the files that people curl up on their couches to watch just for the suspense.

It’s been almost twenty eight years since the principal of this high school committed that horrendous crime, the one I’d caught him in the act of doing while on my way out of the building after a track-and-field practice. If I’d just taken a different stairwell to the parking lot or hadn’t turned back when I did to look for my water bottle I never would have seen him handing over those bags of white powdered narcotics to the supposed janitor, taking a wad of cash into his pocket in return. Running didn’t get me far that day. All it took was the prick of a needle and the firm grasp of crazed masculine hands; I’ve been trapped in here ever since then, ever since he knew that his career would be done for unless he got rid of me.

Students and teachers alike walk past me every day but they cannot see me. My body now has receded to a dusty, empty skeleton nailed between the lockers of the second floor and the wall of the building. My teeth have fallen out of my jaw and litter the floor like dead flies. My wrists, now receded to brittle twigs, are still crossed in the same position that they were bound in behind me. The needles he used to pump my blood full of drugs lay rusted near my decayed right hip. My last memory before the overdose stopped my heart is the view from here. The small pocket my strangled and drugged body was dragged into and trapped in has a tiny crack in the wall that looks out to the courtyard. I can still see the flags from here, shifting in the wind. I can’t remember what the wind feels like anymore; I was fourteen years old when I “went missing.” All I feel now is the dark, empty cold that comes with being alone forever.

There’s something so sad about being forgotten.

I bet there’s something even more sinister about never being able to walk through this place without me trapped here, always watching.