A Teenage Epiphany

By Vaishnavi Malladi

we don’t care about our messy hair,
or the dark circles and eye bags under our apparent eyes.

the headaches from staying up late just to comprehend the cryptic letters crammed onto a bundle of pages,
or the red eyes because you couldn’t sleep just because.

it’s safe to say we all had an epiphany,
an epiphany that we were so overburdened with knowledge, yet we remained dunces.

perhaps it was because somewhere in between understanding the world and understanding what the world perceived of us,
we gave up on ourselves—rather, lost.