Sydney Cloutier ’27

by Sydney Cloutier ’27 on November 6, 2025

You want it to be normal.
Before the drowning,
Before she reached the bottom,
Hit rewind.
Silence.
Fast forward.

Instead of too much,
Now it’s too little,
And her skin hangs off her disappointed frame,
Chanting the same words
That dug the hole so long ago.

It’s only been three years,
And you don’t know how much longer you can stand
This unplanned alternate world,
Where you can’t change a thing
Because it wasn’t you with the bottle in the first place.

You pretend there is no fault,
But we all know.
We all know
What you know,
And she knows it too.

But does she know,
That sometimes,
When her name hangs in the air,
You want to bury it
And see if it will grow.