This is a spoken word piece I wrote a while back about high school:
My family moved to Florida during my
first semester of high school,
and my Mom took us clothes shopping at KMart.
And since I was 12 years old,
I got to pick out my own clothes,
and for the first time,
my own shoes.
And any high schooler knows
that the kicks are the thing.
The essential bling, the shoes
make the man.
And then I saw them, black with neon blue, skate shoes,
dead ringers for AirWalks, if you didn't look too close.
Turbo, the label said. And I told my Mom
"I want these!"
And didn't I roll up into my first day,
trying to be cool at a new school, two months
into the year, and no more than halfway through
the day, I hear
"TURBOS!"
"He's wearing fucking TURBOS, yall."
And how small did I feel in that moment,
how painfully self aware of the division
between me, and these children of privilege.
And how much did it sting that that these shoes
that I had just been so proud of, had now attracted
a crowd of kids who in one hot second knew
just how much better they were than me.
Turbo. It became my nickname, and my daily shame,
how dumb was I to think these shoes were cool?
My new nickname quickly spread around the school,
so much so that new friends thought it was just
what I went by, "oh, you're Turbo, right? Is that
because you run fast?"
No, it's just because I'm poor, something I always knew
but hadn't been a part of my identity before,
until it became my name, and daily shame,
and for three and half years I played along
like it was a game, hiding the fact that
every day I thought about dying.
It's a hard damn thing to
live through the damage to your psyche
when the mirror tells you no one else is like me
when you're a Turbo in a school full of Nikes
And when I finally graduated
it was a weight off my shoulders,
thank god that's over and move on,
no plans to attend the reunion,
Class of no one, forever.
And those scars run deep.
Ten years later I'd started to find my stride
and all the pain and hatred
I'd worked so hard to hide had
begun to subside, and I felt like I'd
become someone, until one day, I'm
around the way and I heard someone say
"Hey, Turbo!", and I turned to see the
face of one of those bullies, and the
long forgotten rage I'd held inside
boiled out in one long hiss.
"I'm not Turbo", I spat.
"My. Name. Is. Chris."
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