I HAVE SOMETHING THAT WILL...
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I stand at the edge of the ocean but the waves aren't lapping softly under the pull of the fresh moon, my body is not fertile valleys
carved under sheets to be traced with your hand in the summer morning,
When you left I wished I was a man, because men don't cry and I cry every day. You told me to take my books and I didn't, then I
walked to this place called Springwater and kept walking thinking I might make it to the Burnside Bridge. I waited for you to text me
that you were okay but you didn't, so I figured you were dead, lying alone in your apartment on the floor with my books mixed with
your books.
The way I stopped being a woman was funny. It happened in a Zoom meeting. But when I realized I wasn't a woman I didn't become a man, everything just
stopped making sense.
When you left I wished I was a man, because I thought then you might have stayed. I thought you probably hated my vagina as much as I did.
Release, I want to release this feeling. I would stand in the mirror and invert my skin so that it pulled taunt to my bones and then maybe it
would look right, one day I told my nutitionist that looking at myself got easier when I pretended I wasn't a woman, I thought this was an obvious
solution but Katie stopped and there was silence over the computer screen and then she just asked me if I wanted to use different pronouns.
I remember you used to draw everything with top surgery scars, they were the next lines after eyes and a mouth, when I write about you I grit my
teeth and it looks like I'm smirking but it's really because I'm uncomfortable, and it's funny because I got that from you.
Crying feels good sometimes, when I was a kid I cried a lot, my parents put me alone in the room I shared with my brother and tied the door knob
to the door across the hall so that I couldn't get out. Then I'd tear the room apart and we'd all laugh about that later, how I used to cry.
My friend transitioned when we were 15, one night we watched Stand By Me in their room and I think we fell in love then, but I didn't know it
until a long time later. Now when they go to work nobody even sees their old skin beneath the new, people just see a man and move on,
I live in a bubble within the world, you view me and I look past myself, so to you there is a body but for me there is nothing below, only a hole and a
drop where I can't see the bottom. Something is wrong but fixing it isn't so easy, because it starts with crying, and I often get stuck there.
I think if I were a man nobody would ever leave. Because men don't cry because they have no reason to. And everything would make sense, and the hole would
disappear and you'd just see me instead of all the things I should have but don't.
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