I’m scared and compared and my opinions are shared. Everything confusing, like a whirlwind of expectations and thoughts and dreams and disappointments… stop… I can’t, the weight of my own skin too much of a burden for the very bones it was placed upon. Don’t worry, don’t judge, don’t care—all worthy rules to abide by; if I wasn’t human; if I wasn’t me. I feel plural, like a singularity that has been multiplied again and again and again and again until, somehow, the supply and demand of my own existence left me as a cheap, penniless fool. The chemical compounds in the sweat on my palms is eating away at my mind. Everyone so indifferent to the fact that my atoms were no longer bonded in homeostasis. My refection like the spelling of my own feelings annotated on a page in front of my eyes. I cannot calculate the derivative of my consciousness or label a diagram of my store bought soul as if it were a carbon copy of something plastic. I am not the words in a textbook or a number on a worksheet. I cannot be printed or copied or pasted, but I can be cut; with razor sharp grades and placements and essays and favorites played like cards in a deck. All poured perfectly into a little glass, like a cocktail of expectations meant to pass through the lips of those too young to drink it. Questions and questions and questions, yet only words that mock answers, and for the sake of irony, I ask you this:

What do you consider education?