I Hope You Haven't

Hello, I will be critiquing your piece on behalf of . I will do my best to help by suggesting improvements that can be made and general feedback on aesthetic appeal.

First Impressions

It's good that you begin with a question that includes a concrete detail, but this piece never really goes beyond that. It's stuck in an endless loop of questioning and and self-identification. It doesn't help that the language is vague and without context to attach meaning towards.

Final Impressions

This piece is rather simple to start with. It's just a long question at the beginning, another long question, and two other long questions. By the end of the piece we, the reader, figure out they are not really questions and really just descriptions of what you've felt at some disembodied period of time. That doesn't work out to well, because the identity of the speaker is faceless at this point and all these floating emotions being described have nothing to attach themselves to and thus no sympathy.

To get the effect you want to achieve, you've always got to start with concrete detail and an idea of what you want to achieve. What the connotations of your piece seem to mostly compose is pain, loneliness, and self-loathe. To look at how to achieve a more emotional response from the reader let's look at some of the poetry by Sylvia Plath. In "Tulips" she writes "The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me./Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe/Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby." in order to convey anxiety and a deep seated hatred for sympathy. In "Daddy" the lines, "I was ten when they buried you./At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you./I thought even the bones would do." express extreme emotional strain and longing, a desire to have something she cannot have, a father-figure long since dead and tormenting her from the beyond.

As you can see, Plath uses two things to accomplish this portrayal of extreme emotions without resorting to cliche or abstract statements. The first is a physical object with emotional attachment (Tulips, for sympathy and hospital wishes, the body of a father, to represent a buried past and the trauma of memory) and the second is the poet's emotional reflection rendered in figurative language ("...breathe/Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby." "I thought even the bones would do.").

By using these two things (a physical object with emotional attachment and figurative language for emotional reflection) you should be able to write pain, loneliness, and self-loathe without resorting to cliches like "a hole Where your heart should be", "pain to the point [that] You are entirely numb".

Hope this helps.