100 Word Challenge: Listen

Here is tonight’s offering for the 100 Challenge Tara Roberts puts on over at Thin Spiral Notebook. She gave us the word listen and exactly 100 words for our response, no more and no less. This prompt was a particularly powerful one for me as a counselor because so much of what I do is listening. I give you

Reflections of a Counselor

Tears well up as simmering fury
bubbles just below the surface.

Fists clench and muscles tremble
fighting that internal battle.

Anxious words push their way free
from a throat thick with feeling.

Yet the words won’t come—
not the way they’re needed.

Desperate yearning hidden between the lines
colors each hard-won phrase spoken aloud.

A realization grows
through the unshed tears.

They aren’t listening,
they don’t get it.

They can’t see what lies beneath
the mask of anger presented to the world.

There’s so much more than rage
hidden behind the disguise.

It’s waiting there
for someone to finally hear.