The Inside

 The Inside

What makes a boy a boy or a girl a girl?

Is it what’s between their legs?

What’s on their chest or lack thereof?

The clothes they wear?

What happened to, “it’s on the inside that counts?” 

I bind my chest

I wear baggy clothes

I try to act the role of what I am on the inside

Still, society sees me as ‘Noe’ 

Who is Noe?

Noe is the little girl who died when I was 12

Noe is the girl who’s body I own

Noe is the random jumble of syllables and letters that doesn’t fit

The person on the inside 

So who is on the inside?

On the inside is Logan

Logan is the boy who was born when Noe died

Logan is the boy stuck in a girl’s body

Logan is the boy who suffers trying to make society see him

Logan is the boy who’s always cast in the shadows of

The girl’s body he’s forced to own

Some days Noe comes back out

Some days Noe is shown to the world again

Those days when the body is put in dresses and skirts

That’s when Noe comes back

And she gets told, “You make such a nice girl!”

“You look beautiful!” 

You know what Logan wants to hear most?

He wants to hear that this doesn’t look right

That the dress his body is forced in doesn’t fit his place

That he looks ugly, terrible even

And he should go back to Logan, and let Noe stay dead

Scars line his wrist

Her wrist

He scars her body because he feels it isn’t his

He was forced into this body at birth to suffer

And the scars let the suffering be known

And yet he is questioned,

“What happened there?”

He lies those familiar lies he’s already thought of and rehearsed in his mind

“I fell,”

“I scraped it against something,”

“I got hit with a tree branch,”

Anything to satisfy their questioning 

This girl

This boy

This person is forced in this body, suffering everyday

Trying to make it another four more years

He is only a freshman in high school

He’s always told this will go away, that it’s just a phase

He’s been in this “phase” for 3 years

It isn’t a phase

It won’t go away

He barely survives for his friends

The people who truly know who he is and accepts him for who he is

Those are the people he lives for

And all the others hate and rejection can’t measure up

For if they did, Logan would be dead