Did    Dracula    Ever    REALLY    Exist?

There is no getting around it, we all do it sometimes. Whether you are blowing off your sib, fighting with your mother, or singling someone out of a group, you emotional scar people. This next tragedy is true and I want you to think of the little boy in this story next time you want to hurt someone. You can say but what if this person did this to me or whatever, but this little boy was innocent. Being relentless and having revenge are sometimes very different just as they are sometimes the same.

He always wanted to explain things, but no one cared. So he drew. Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything. He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky and it would be only him and the sky and the things inside of him that needed saying. It was after that he drew the picture. He kept it under his pillow and would let no one see it. He would look at it every night and think about it.
When he started school, he brought it with him, not to show anyone, just to have along like a friend. It was funny about school. He sat at a brown square desk like all the other square brown desks. He thought it should be red. His room was a square room like all the other rooms. It was tight and close and stiff. He hated to hold the pencil and chalk his arms stiff his feet flat on the floor, stiff, the teacher watching and watching. The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys. He said he didn't like them. She said it didn't matter!
After that they drew. He drew all yellow. It was the way he felt about morning, and it was beautiful. The teacher came and smiled at him. "What's this?" she asked. "Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing? Isn't that beautiful?"
After that, his mother bought him a tie, and he always drew airplanes and rocketships like everyone else. And he threw the old picture away. When he lay alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue and all of everything, but he wasn't anymore. He was square inside and brown, and his hands were stiff. He was like everyone else.
The things inside him that needed saying didn't need it anymore. It had stopped pushing. It was crushed. Stiff. Like everything else.
--- This was written by a high school senior in Alton, Illinois two weeks before he committed suicide.