1. I keep looking for unrelenting edges, but my hands can only find soft. It seems you forgot to give me corners where I was sharp and bony, there is just a shakily drawn silhouette large in all the wrong ways and a never-ending stretch of skin piling up over itself. And yet, it is never enough to hold me.
2. What will I do with these cheeks and sunken eyes, this face that I have cut out of pictures too many times? What will I do with these hips jutting out like an unwanted child and these narrow shoulders that held up my slouched frame through the entirety of an adolescence so aggravated in its loneliness and undesirability? What will I do with this fear of my own body and the ache arising in the pit of my stomach?
3. In the space between my body and the mirror, there is a world where I unzip and climb out of my old body to reveal a man in a sari. In this world, I am a boy in a slutty dress who does not let anyone tell him he is a misshap. In this world, I am a freak and my mother still loves me. In this world, I am a freak but not an anomaly. In this world, I am my mother's son and I never had to go through any of this.
4. This world is fragile and your nails slice through it like a knife through my flesh.
5. I keep dreaming up new worlds where people love me no matter what because I am not sure the ones in front of me do. Any moment now, you will stop talking to me if I tell you. I know this because I have asked you again and again. I know this because I have stopped mistaking silence for acceptance.
6. My shadow collects itself from the cobblestone pavement and leaves as the light does, my reflection blurs and ebbs away with the water, but I am stuck with this forever. I imagine if my body is a house, standing silent and empty against the night, I am the ghost that refuses to haunt it.
7. I will never tell you this because I am so scared you will stop loving me. You will treat me like a bad habit. You will call up your friends and complain about your freak kid and then they will tell their kid about me, as a warning, and their kid will think it will be different in a few years, that their parents will change but they won't and the kid will finally unzip their body and climb out.
8. I am so sorry I turned out this way. I wish I could undo all of this. Move to a place where I wouldn't have to explain myself and leave all of you behind like the coward I am. I wish I could look away from this.
9. My body is gone, but I am still here. I am waiting for a new body. I am waiting to be a boy in a dress. I am so cold.
YOU ARE READING
THE SADNESS OF CLOTHES.
Poetry─ he is gone and no one can tell us where / (emily fragos)
