“The pen is mightier than the sword,” she said,
and all I could think of was that the bad guys don’t use swords anymore. Words can stop you from being sliced by those glorified knifes, but that isn’t the problem anymore.
She can’t tell me the pen is mightier than the hand. The pen is not mightier than the fist that hit me over and over. The pen can draw over the bruises, but it cannot destroy them.
I carried pens in my pockets for months in middle school, and she used them to stab me. My words were turned on me. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” my English teacher cried, but the bad guys have stolen our pens.
The pen is not mightier than the body that pushed me into the floor that afternoon. I had no words because I had no might. I was weak and he was not, his arms were swords on the battleground of my body, and while there were no scars, it was still a massacre. And the blank pages that followed are fitting, when faced with the blank memory I left in my subconscious.
“The pen is mightier than the sword,.” she said, but all around me, I hear “put down the pen. stop talking, stop writing, get over it.” But I never let go of this pen, this last hope. She is the one person telling me what I need to hear, while my parents are using swords to cut down my ink supply.
The pen may not be any more than a tool for writing, but it is for sure mightier than my trauma.
Written by Felix Flax
