02 Moon Two: The Classroom of Shadows

from Three Moons in My Ribcage

The second moon cracked open on a Wednesday.
Rain. Uniforms. Chalkdust in the throat.
I was seated in the second row, third seat,
watching the teacher draw a square on the board
and call it truth.

That was the first time I understood
that learning was a spell.
Not a gift. Not a path.
A narrowing.
A slow, surgical shrinking of the world
until only the box remained.

The moon inside me stirred.
Not gentle. Not slow.
It shivered,
and the shadows in the corners of the classroom
sat up like dogs called by name.

We were told to raise our hands to speak.
To ask permission to piss.
To write letters in loops
that no longer belonged to the alphabet of wonder.
We were told to recite things we did not believe,
to memorise things we were not allowed to question.
And we did.
Some of us even smiled.
I did not.
The second moon would not allow it.

I saw things.
Not hallucinations.
Not ghosts.
Truths.
The teacher’s voice would slip between syllables
and I would hear what she meant.
Not what she said.
And what she meant was always uglier.
Smaller.
Designed to fit neatly into skulls still growing.

The alphabet became a cage.
A. B. C. D. E. F. Fail.
G was for guilt.
H for humiliation.
I was never for imagination.
I was for indoctrination.

One day, I looked outside
and the sky was purple.
Everyone else saw blue.
I knew then that colour itself was under siege.
Consensus was a weapon.
And reality had been rigged before I was even born.

I stopped speaking aloud.
Language belonged to them.
They owned the grammar.
The moon and I developed our own syntax.
I wrote backwards.
In spirals.
In diagrams only I could read.
The school counsellor called it a cry for help.
But I wasn’t crying.
I was resisting.

They called me disturbed.
But I was distilled.
Boiled down to my raw refusal.
I would not let them smooth me.
I would not let them round my edges
until I could fit through the polite holes
they carved into their systems.

And so the second moon grew claws.
It carved warnings into my bones.
Scratched riddles into my notebooks.
Left symbols in my vomit.
I was not well.
But I was awake.

The classroom became a morgue
where dreams were embalmed
and buried under standardised testing.
I held my breath for years.
Learned to breathe through the silence
between bell-rings.

I graduated without applause.
Without fanfare.
Without forgetting.

The second moon still sits behind my eyes.
Every time I hear authority speak, it purrs.
Every time I smell chalk, it sharpens its claws.
Every time someone says “It’s for your own good,”
it begins to laugh.

And I do not stop it.
I let it laugh.
I let it laugh until it hurts.
Because somewhere in that pain
is the only honest lesson I was ever taught.