To Those Who Are Held Back By An Ill-fitting Skin

to those who are held back by an ill-fitting skin

my friend, he cried in my arms i held him close and let him weep until he could let it go and talk without fear of trembling.

he told me they had done nothing it was just words that had hurt him so left bruises and cuts and scars all over. they said that there are only girls-who-are-girls and boys-who-are-boys and there was no in between no either/or no and.

he cried for the wrongness of it, the idea that he was not supposed to be who he thought he was. the other day, he said, someone asked me what i was. i didn’t know what they meant i didn’t know i didn’t know

the question was not what are you but who are you and no one seemed to ask.

i told him they were right and he screamed, beating at my chest and crying i was just like them. i held him tight within the cage of my arms and did not let go, waited until he had worn himself out with the agony of perceived betrayal. then i whispered softly that i had a secret.

i told him that they were right there are no boy-who-are-girls and girls-who-are-boys there are girls, and boys, and either/or and and you are what you choose to be and who you think you are is what you am

you are not a girl-who-is-a-boy and i am not a boy-who-is-a-girl you are a boy and i am a girl let’s hold hands instead of the broken halves of our hearts.

i don’t mean to demean the struggle you have endured, the part of your being that comes from living for years in an ill fitting skin. that has and always will be you, it has made you and shaped you to be who you are.

but until we realise that people are people and you cannot change that no matter the gender or non gender you are a boy and i am a girl. when we can be recognised as boys and girls

then, maybe, if you want you can be a boy-who-used-to-be-a-girl and i will still call you John.

through my words he stopped crying and beating against my chest, rested his head on my shoulder and held on for dear life. his skin felt a little less constricting a little less ill-fitting, broken and burnt. with that i said my secret- the one that kept me here.

you are what you think you are and that, my dear, is beautiful.

excuses that could be reasons if you thought about them for long enough

1. I'm sure that it would've lasted if we tried 2. Trying was too hard 3. I couldn't pretend to love you any more than you could pretend not to hate me 4. You never told me I had to catch you 5. I fell all on my own 6. We could've loved each other and I think we might've 7. If only I knew how to love 8. It was your fault 9. It was mine 10. It wasn't either of our faults it was just the way things went 11. You were the ocean and I was the rocks, we beat away at each other until there was nothing left of either of us 12. The waves don't lose their happiness when they beat against the rocks 13. Love, I wasn't ready for you to leave 14. I'm sorry for all the things I said but I know that I meant them 15. In the end, we knew it couldn't last 16. It's raining here and I am in someone else's bed 17. Absolve me of my hatred, father forgive me for I have sinned 18. Honey I love you that's all she wrote 19. Goodbye was always meant to be forever and I knew we weren't 20. If I had told you before now, would things have turned out differently?

pretty girls aren't so pretty

red lips, dark eyes, hair tied up into bows. pretty girls don’t wear skeleton tights, don’t make black eyes with eyeliner and bruises. pretty girls don’t get into fights, don’t voice their opinion and say what’s on their mind. quiet isn’t a state of being it’s a requirement of beauty because when you speak that angel’s bow gets all twisted out of shape. no one likes a snarl, honey, don’t do that don’t give me that look it’s for your own good. boys like girls who are pretty who act pretty who don’t fight back. don’t claw your hands and sharpen your nails, paint them pink pastel not red like blood. pretty girls don’t smile like that, teeth out to bite put your fangs back in and hide that darkness. at least until someone claims you and breaks you of that nasty habit, your idea that you are more than just a pretty face. no one cares what’s inside your head, darling don’t you understand what I’m trying to say? you’re just a pretty face and nobody likes their paintings to talk and think do they. pretty girls don’t fight like that honey pretty girls use words not their fists you should know how many pretty girls have tried to fight you? cat eyes and bloody lips, hair in knots like the the wind owns you. pretty girls don’t look like that. pretty girls don’t act like you why don’t you understand? you’ll never get anywhere in life unless you’re pretty and pretty doesn’t mean what you think it does, you’re only a pretty face. you can move the earth on your own but think about how many decimal places there are in that number it makes you less than significant, irrelevant. you can’t move the world and time won’t stop for you. pretty girls don’t write like that, pretty girls don’t have scars like that baby don’t you dare fuck this up you will be a pretty girl. pretty girls don’t paint their faces like a mask pretty girls wear their masks all the time. pretty girls is what the boys want their girls to be. pretty girls aren’t like you baby why can’t you be a pretty girl? pretty girls don’t dress like hookers, they dress for boys and for attention. not attention like you get, the strange stares in the hallways. that’s not pretty. believe me honey you’ll thank me when you’re older even if you say right now you hate me you’ll learn. pretty girls, pretty pretty girls. red lips like candy not like blood dark eyes like smoke not like bruises and hair tied up with pretty little bows. look in the mirror don’t you like what you’ve become? a pretty, pretty girl.

ghost writers in eight voices

i. these words are not mine, and neither is that voice in your ear that sings them to you.

ii. I know how the ghost writers felt creating stories that were not their own, writing words that they did not say or feel or mean. it’s the struggle of the lyricist behind closed doors who pours their unfelt grief and heartache into someone else’s lies.

iii. no one tells the truth in this creative industry; depression and misery and sorrow and fear and death are not romantic in the slightest. death is not pretty, falling is not graceful, misery is not composed and fear is all-consuming, all-enveloping.

iv. can you imagine the ghost writers in a conference together, a room full of people so unused to speaking their own mind that their voices crack and lips tremble at the thought? it’d be the quietest room you’d ever been in because once you forgo your voice for someone else’s, you forget how to speak on your own. it takes a lifetime to remember the way you lilt and how you speak, the words you use and the ones you don’t and the familiar cadence of your mind.

v. all those ghost writers are in a room somewhere with the lyricists who write songs for other people, learning how to be their own again and lord, how it scares them.

vi. I’d be scared too if I had to wrap my mouth around the strange words, unfamiliar sounds of things that used to be yours but were no longer; like kissing someone you used to love on the mouth only they don’t taste the same.

vii. those words are the embodiment of j'aimais vous, the feeling you should know something but don’t like how a voice sounds familiar in all the wrong ways

viii. it’s the ghost hidden in the walls of the room, tossing and turning in its sleep as it remember what it feels like deep down buried inside to know something, and to claim it as your own.

circles, merry-go-rounds, ferris wheels and galaxies

The earth does not revolve around love. Neither do any other planets, stars or even our star the sun. Circles do not revolve around love and neither do tilt-a-whirls. Ferris wheels are debatable. In actuality there are a rather lot of things that do not revolve around love; the earth revolves around the sun at a 23.5 degree tilt in which 24 hours equals one rotation and 365 days a revolution. We are orbited by a moon which revolves because of our gravitational pull (and we probably had a collision with a meteor which created our moon- not love). The star that both our moon and planet revolve around is midway out of the galaxy (the Milky Way galaxy to be precise) halfway through the Sagittarius arm in the Orion spur, and the entire solar system is revolving around a centre in the spiral galaxy. This galaxy is wildly careening about in the abyss of space and, on occasion, colliding with other galaxies. Circles are created around an origin, a centre point and revolve around that. Tilt a whirls depend on the pull of gravity, the principle of inertia and focal points to work, and nowhere in that entire explanations is a single one of those things revolve around love. And those are just the obvious ones.

if you cannot own yourself who are you

nothing is ours; not really and not ever we are all made out of the same generic mold and predispositions claiming to have found a new way to be original in our fixed rigidity. our ideas are merely thoughts been thought over a dozen times in the last second, a thousand in a minute and millions in a day our minds are preposterous unthinkably so that at the mere mention of all this being thought, being done and said before we build a city of bones around us hiding in our closet made of skeletons how can we not realise we are the skeletons? we are nothing but skin and bones rotting in our unofficial homes and when we are afraid of the dark we are afraid of ourselves. of what we might be. that we may see we are never truly our own.