Hear Our SIlenced Cries

• Kim Brumley, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2008

Look at us. Look at our fallen companions, scrambling to hold their dignity. In this battlefield, we are not heard. We are not seen, at least not by anyone who could help. Shrill laughter echoes around us, a chorus of taunting calls. Provocation. They want us to draw ourselves up for one last stand. Don’t be fooled. Their only want is to beat us down for a final show. To finally break us so that we are nothing more than a broken soul barely contained in an abandoned body. The will to live is departing, along with any chance of a remedy to this lonesome existence.

What is the cause? What could cause such a detriment in our modern society? With time, the brutality has only increased as the world has developed. New methods of delivering such pain were opened with this passing of time.

How can this be happening? Every single day, someone is taking this pain. No one else knows. They hold it all in. No one could help anyway. That is what they honestly believe. They take it one day at a time, but the pain doesn’t lessen. Until one day it becomes too much to bear for one so young. They decide to end it once and for all. If they aren’t breathing the air of this world then the torture will stop. It seems like the easy way out, such an easy way to end it all. To end the suffering, once and for all.

“They ended their own life; I had no part in their decision.”
That’s what the people behind these attacks tell themselves, but they know what they had a part in. If the youth of this generation would only realise how serious their impact on their peers is, life could be easier for so many people. Teenagers could attend school without fear of exclusion or abuse. They could return home without fear of hate emails waiting to greet them. No abusive text messages would fill their phone’s inbox. Is it not enough for them to endure it in the place where education is supposed to be their sole focus? Even in their homes they can find no escape from the darkness. Social bullying, that is the cause of this aching scar that is tarnishing our youth. In a way it’s more painful and scarring than any physical pain could ever be.

Even so, we are bonded by this torment. Our pride will not shatter, even with their laughter relentlessly drilling into our thoughts. We arise for that last stand, the one that they’ve been waiting for. Standing together, we fend of this attack. Not with words or violence, but with the realisation; what they say means nothing; their cruelty does not deserve our tears or frustration. Least of all does it deserve our lives. With that motto imprinted in our mentality, we can feel the only emotion we should allow them to make us feel towards them…Pity.