They say a word is enough for the wise.
But what about those who need you to say it twice?
Not because they’re defiant,
but because they didn’t catch it the first time,
nor the second.
Does that make them foolish?
We wear crown of flowers for brightest minds,
and truly, they deserve it.
But what about the rest of us?
The ones who stayed up all night too,
trying to repaint our walls white,
hoping the colour might rub off on us?
But no matter how hard we paint,
we only end up with
a darker shade of white.
A side eye.
A faint “well done.”
That’s all we get.
And who can blame them?
They didn’t see the effort,
and neither did they see the result.
We keep searching for a new version of ourselves,
a new name, a new colour.
But even then,
we stumble over the proNOUNciation
of the identity we crave.
We try to solve ourselves like equations.
To balance what we know with what we feel.
But the numbers keep slipping.
Math was never our stronghold.
Our two plus two always seemed to equal three.
The formulas never added up,
and sometimes, that followed us into life.
We’ve done what everyone said we should,
but we never got the same results.
Sometimes excellence feels like a place we keep walking towards,
but our feet whisper,
“Maybe that’s too far.”
And heaven knows we tried.
No one saw the struggle,
But everyone saw the silence that followed the fall.
Until we stopped trying,
and realised how far behind we’d fallen.
How much of us had already faded.
Still, here we are.
Off-white, but still standing.
A little chipped, but present.
And maybe,
just maybe,
Off- white is the new cool.
But no.
Off-white cannot be the new cool.
Mediocrity should never be praised.
Because the truth is,
we don’t want to be almost bright,
or almost good,
or almost seen.
We want to shine.
To finally break through the dark paint,
and see what we really look like
when the light is ours.
