Powerless

Aladdin's been waxing creative. He's taken to posting notes on Facebook, usually prose, but sometimes poetry, and almost always allegory for what he's thinking and feeling. This isn't actually what frustrates me - while I prefer a blog rather than Facebook notes, I'm all for creative mental unloading on the internet. What frustrates me is the responses he gets to his notes. Girls who don't know him terribly well will comment that his stuff is brilliant, and beautiful, and that they think he's a great artist. They fawn over the despair in the notes. Other kids will post stuff like "this is really cool, keep writing, man" or "dude sick", but they all have the same message: "Wow, I didn't know you could fake sadness like this well enough to write that." And that's what drives me crazy.
Aladdin's not writing them because he fancies himself the next Emily Dickinson. I seriously doubt he's writing them for the compliments he gets from Padme and her friends. I am fairly confident that he's writing them because he needs help. I believe that each time he posts one, he hopes that somehow, someone will understand that he's not just creatively making up the pain in the poems. And I don't think most people who read them understand that, or maybe they just don't want to.
It would be easier to not see the pain. It would be easier to accept the facade that he's frequently put up of a happy, cheerful, somewhat shallow guy who gets along with everyone than to look deeper and see the kid who's constantly at war with his own mind. And I wish I could point that out to all his Facebook-note fans, but I can't. It would be a betrayal of his confidence. And so I'm left powerless to help. And I wish I weren't.