Slam Poem (for the final)

We as a society have a tendency to ignore the silent. The ones who hide in the dark places. They hide from the spotlight so that no one can gauge just how much they've bent under the weight of the would they carry on their shoulders. Their minds and emotions have an age far beyond their years. It's these people whose tears fall into the darkness with no light around to make them shimmer. The ones who assign dimmer switches to their lives so they aren't forced to give this world all or nothing. It's these people who fall under the infinite weight of depression and self-loathing with no one around to help reassemble the shards of their shattered lives. These are the people who give off a vibe of hatred when you pass them by. Hatred for all life and everything that it's brought them... or rather hasn't. They bend in the darkness, farther than most could. The pained cries for help and love in the moments before they break don't make a sound. In the darkness there isn't a soul around to hear you fall. You can only glue your life back together before the pieces no longer fit. I believe that it is in this mentality that people pursue death. Where they spend their days contemplating ways to stop their breath. This is when they spend the last of their energy learning how to tie a noose. It's now that when they're holding a bottle of pills, their fingers get a little loose. Whether it was the bullies, the beatings, the loneliness, or the counselor in the anti-suicide group meetings who assures him day after wretched day, "It'll all fix itself, just wait." It's fate that none of us will live happily, but it's our job to try. Because when you die, you die alone, even when surrounded  by the people who claimed they meant something to you. Whether they do or don't we won't be able to call them out on the lie. We'll be too busy saying goodbye to the ones who actually mattered. Looking back on our shit-storm of a life and smiling, regretting nothing beyond the fact that it's coming to an end. That we can't bend the will of death to give us more time just to prove we have the strength to go on. We smile because we survived. We could have drowned during our dive to depression as so many before us. We fade from the world leaving only the lesson that life is not impossible. It's a lonely road that we walk with sudden turns for the worse. It burns our consciences to think that our time won't be spent in the world we were promised as kids. We don't live in a world growing up to be what we want. You're not gonna be a princess. You're not going to be a superhero. I have yet to own an ice cream shop. We do what we can to scrape by. We try to make the free-fall to death look like a graceful way down. We tend, though, to get a face full of dirt when we eat shit hitting the ground. But despite our lack of grace, or a parachute, we pause in the seconds before impact to say to ourselves, "It was worth it."