They get more attention with negativity.
I‘ve never noticed them so close before.
Their face distort and recombine again and again,
Monsters, who are beyond my recognition.
Words are sharp like knives,
Stab at that girl,
Just because she dried her bra on the balcony.
Laughing is cool,
Freeze a heart that wants to help them.

An easy conclusion was generated by the heavy fire,
Spurred by the smoke that blinded my sight.
I flipped the coin to its darkest side,
And bury them into the deep shadow.
Guilty, I declared that, and then refusing their invited games,
Holding the judge’s gavel in a world carved strictly in two
Black or White,
Victim or Monster,
Right or Wrong.

I told my “righteous belief ” to my teacher,
Expecting a nod,
Expecting her to sign the sentence.
Instead, she broke the scale
And pulled a coin from her hand,
Balanced it, and asked me to guess which side was up.
“Tails,” I said.
She opened her palm.
The coin wasn’t tails or heads.
It stood upright on its slender edge.
It held both faces at once,
A three dimensional truth standing in the quiet space between.

A cool realization blew over the lingering smoke.
My memory went back to that small town.
I thought about the children who shared their loneliness with me.
Their parents worked far away,
Coming home only after a long time.
Their grandparents were the ones who stayed beside them.
After school, they used an old phone to scroll short videos online,
Play games with strangers,
And spent their time in a world that algorithms already calculate for them,
A fancy dream,
A violent dream,
A dream they never chose.
A shadow that grows without their knowing.
I had condemned a whole life in a single fleeting moment.
I never thought about what they experienced,
Who raised them,
Where they learn these jokes.
It didn’t erase the knives they threw,
Nor did it soothe the girl’s shame.
But it made me look at myself.
I, who claimed to fight with stereotypes,
Had created one of my own.

So I returned to that classroom on the mountain,
Not as a judge handing down verdicts,
But as someone holding up a mirror.
We talked about how social media shape us,
About how people think,
About the hidden biases we carry without noticing.

Can one lesson rewrite a young life?
I don’t know.
Can I heal a society with a piece of chalk?
Yes.

BecauseI am not alone.
My friends and I are here,
Growing alongside the children.
Like trees, they absorb the cleanest water,
Growing little by little,
Until one day,
They can become trees

I’ll look beyond the side I see,
I’ll leave it standing on its narrow edge,
With the fire of justice still burning in my chest,
And before I make my judgment,
I ask myself:

Which side of the coin haven’t I seen yet?