Claire Legrand

How can the world look so perfect when I feel so broken?

What am I?

A lump of heaviness. A stranger. A thing that does not fit.

I can’t seem to stop the poison inside me from spreading.

(I mean, I’ve never been poisoned, so I am only speculating.)

(But I do feel something spreading inside me. Something heavy and dark.)

I can’t let them see it.

“Only fools try to run away from fear,” called the snake. “What you must do is learn to walk alongside it.”

If you are afraid, sad, tired, or lonely if you feel lost or strange if you crave stories and adventure, and the magic possibility of a forest path—this book is for you

My chest is knotted up. I feel like a person standing in the middle of a crowded street. The person is screaming, but nothing is coming out, and no one’s paying attention anyway.

Everything looks like a painting: blue sky, white house, bright flowers.

How can the world look so perfect when I feel so broken?

I see adult women. My three aunts.

There are smiles, and hugs that are honestly painful to me because I’m not accustomed to strangers invading my personal space.

The wrinkle between Mom’s eyebrows vanishes. She approves.

I wish the wrinkles inside me could disappear so easily.

The longer they stay, she tells me, the harder it will be for her to leave me. And this is the right thing to do, she says. She and Dad have decided it will be good for me, to spend time with my family.

I think she sounds like she has been crying too, but I don’t want to know if that’s true.

Once she leaves the room, I lie flat and stare at the chandelier above my bed. This is a room for a princess, and I am anything but that.

What am I?

A lump of heaviness. A stranger. A thing that does not fit.

I can’t seem to stop the poison inside me from spreading.

(I mean, I’ve never been poisoned, so I am only speculating.)

(But I do feel something spreading inside me. Something heavy and dark.)

I can’t let them see it.

They can’t know my secret. Not these people in this clean, white palace. Not even Mom and Dad know. And they never will.

The Everwood won’t leave me.

The Everwood is always right here, in my notebook, on these straight lines.

The Everwood is one thing I can always understand.