Smoke Signals

By Sragvi Patlolla, 16, North Carolina

Imagine you’re always on fire

everywhere you go,

but it’s invisible and

no one can see the smoke.

You try to describe it,

but most have never tasted flame

so they ask on a scale of 1 to 10,

but numbers don’t feel pain.

And everybody claims

we’re all granted our own ball of chaos,

yet, somehow, all the same,

being on fire has never seemed to pay off.

You watch as the others 

build bridges out of boulders

while you sink under the weight

of your potential on your shoulders.

And medals might just fill the walls

but none of them will mean a thing;

there are no prizes for the greatest of all,

the insignificant feat of surviving.

Because not only are you supposed to live,

you’re meant to heal people, fight battles, and thrive.

they’ll tell you ‘you’ll change the world’ and you’ll believe them

just long enough to forget you’re on fire.

And when you remember

(for flames don’t let you forget),

you’ll wonder if you’re somehow a con artist, a liar.

So on top of surviving, and thriving, and dying

you have to remind yourself

that you’re really on fire.

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I’ve noticed that it’s a really common experience for people to struggle with their physical and mental health at the same time because they directly impact each other in a lot of ways. I realized that it was hard for a lot of people to conceptualize because mental health isn’t visible or even always noticeable, and I use the metaphor of being on fire to provide imagery that is lacking in real life.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski