Unfortunately Educated

In school they teach you

How to multiply 9x8

Make you read Macbeth

And have you memorize the first

10 Amendments to the Constitution.

But they don’t teach you how to

Stop loving someone who has

Stopped loving you

Or how to deal with losing

A friend to an unsaid goodbye

And a relative to cancer that

Ate away her brain.

At home I learned

From my father that

Alcohol can make as many problems as it can solve

But damn does it hurt

To feel my cheeks burn after an encounter with you

That I couldn’t ever win.

I just couldn’t solve you

And I can’t solve me.

Because life isn’t 9x8

And it isn’t the way authors describe

Their characters in a story.

It’s those nights you lay awake

Missing someone

Wishing things could be different

And it’s the next day when you realize they can’t

And then it’s how you pick yourself up

After being down for so long.

I taught myself that.