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Jul 17, 2026
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Get better soon.
I’m not going to get better,
and I’m only sixteen.
Having to hear “you’re fine, just get over it”—
oh my, do I wish it were that easy.
It’s invisible,
so counterfeit to you,
but for me, I look around
and see everything I could be.
This counterfeit thing
is so much more than that.
I’m starting to question myself too.
Why stay in this pain?
But all I can say is,
this pain is my life.
I can’t just get better.
Trust me—
all of the “get better soon”
are just as relevant
as knowing that, for as long as I live,
soon is never going to come.
I used to see soon as hope,
my reason to keep going.
Because I thought that sometime soon—
even if I couldn’t see it—
I’d be normal.
It’s strange being told “get well soon”
when you know you won’t.
It feels like people saying
they hope you’ll be normal,
like them.
And so do I.
To have a day where I’m not questioned.
To have a day where I feel stable.
To have a day where I don’t have to explain
my existence to someone—
because at the end of the day,
they will get better soon.
All I can do is look around
at those who read between my lines,
who understand what it’s like
not to be normal,
not to be fine,
what it feels like
when soon is never coming.
And I thank them
for just that.
— thegreengirl, Jul 17, 2026
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About This Poem
Last Few Words: I wrote this poem to express what it feels like to live with chronic illness at a young age, especially when the pain is invisible and often misunderstood.
Style/Type: Free verse
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
4 days 8 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's emotional core is clear and genuinely felt: the speaker is living with a chronic condition — physical, mental, or both — and the central irony of "get better soon" landing as a kind of unwitting cruelty is a strong, specific observation worth building a poem around. The word "soon" does real work here, and the closing movement toward those who understand offers a quiet, earned turn rather than a forced resolution.
The main area to develop is precision in the middle sections. "Counterfeit" appears twice but its meaning shifts slightly each time without that shift being made to carry weight — the word feels borrowed rather than owned, and replacing it with something more particular to this speaker's experience would strengthen those stanzas considerably. Similarly, lines like "everything I could be" and "my existence" are abstract in ways that pull the poem away from its own best instincts, which are concrete and observational. The most alive moments — "soon is never going to come," the list of three "to have a day" lines — work precisely because they name something specific. Pushing that same specificity into the vaguer passages would make the whole poem as persuasive as its strongest parts.
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Geezer
4 days 1 hour ago
Just because...
I am not young, it does not mean that I cannot see the possibilities of what I could accomplish if I were not terminally ill. Oh, not within the next few years, but... It kind of ties in with one of my favorite tropes.
"Nobody likes getting old, but we all want to keep doing it."
I like that you have the courage to write about it.
It makes me want to tell you, that I know you are not going to get "better", but you can be better, in the way that you live what you have left.
The last stanza of the piece and especially the last two lines, say it all. Sweet and complete. ~ Geezer.
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