I feel trapped in my vase as i fish another smoke from the pack at 2:30am. Such a broken vase. Angry red lines spiderweb across skin as a reminder of all the times i became so desperate that i would carve my way out.
This morning it is my shoulders and ribs and my collarbones, I'm too wide. My hands feel my ribs and ache to smash them in, aligning with anger where your hands once traced such graceful lines. When she felt your small, important weight resting on her frame, she was whole. She was maybe small, or it wasn't wrong to be big. She was large enough to surround you, she was a mother bear, hungry for the fruit you seemed to grow to share with her.
Regret that i met you when I was so deep in this cocoon. So awkward, ungraceful, on a path to a final form, breasts budding unevenly from a frame at once too course and too soft to be anything but incomplete. I never felt like i was one thing, becoming something else, or that i was one thing in disguise, i felt like i was there waiting to be seen, and left unseen for years.
She was so ugly they never called her by her name. She was so ugly they never asked her to school dances, or wanted to take her shopping. She was so ugly they sent her onto frontiers in pads to wrestle the ball from boy's hands. They gave her shovels and she dug holes to earn her rent. And when they pulled her back into their beds they would never kiss the crook of her arm, but instead asked for a gladiator she can no longer pretend to be. Her weapon was an unwanted fixture, jutting from her root like nature's worst mistake. Until you held her and worked in her garden. There weren't any mistakes there, in that place. How, so soon, can a body be returned to that martial law, from the knowing of such a fleeting golden age? To be trans is to suffer under a sadistic tyrant in your own mind.
I am a Golem, or am Grendel, or am otherwise misshapen, otherwise mistaken for a mask i work so hard to leave in gutters and at the bottom of glasses, but you saw me. Somewhere under rubber and gauze and layers of defenses, you saw in. I don't have what it takes to hide from you, now. You called these insides raw and weeping and red, cameron called these lines red, too, angry:
Angry red lines, like my skin was a test, and i got every answer wrong.
I am raw, and red, and weeping inside, and i am exposed to you. And you should harm me if it'll make you whole.
