to burn;

I think he’s very lonely. Lonelier than he lets on. Maybe lonelier than he even realizes.

there are infinite universes, you tell me, sipping on coffee and smiling in that hungry-teeth way that makes me think maybe last night you battled demons and are still recovering you say that each of our nightmares are glimpses into another reality because with infinity, everything that could be, is and somewhere in those words is a hollow note like a greedy thirst like you maybe saw your own death and now you’re jealous of the version of you which actually achieved it and i don’t know much but i do know that we’re in the universe where monkeys evolved to write hamlet and maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you but i do know that they pointed a telescope out to the black nothingness beyond our moon and after four years, that glass eye picked up evidence of tens of thousands of undiscovered places where love and peace and good coffee might all exist like there might be life out there in all that blackness i do know that we look at the moons in our life and think that we are the darkness beside it, we think that we will never shine like our best friends or we’ll never be our mom’s favorite or we’ll never actually succeed at anything but four years is a long time and four years ago i was nothing but a black hole and i still pointed my soul in the direction of my darkness and said “find the light within” and after four years of staring i’ve seen such wonderful and terrifying things and not all of it has been easy and not all of it has been fun but good lord the possibilities i’ve found tucked away inside of myself are so endless and extraordinary that i cannot contain the joy of it all because yes, i could focus on the coldness of space, but i’d rather think about the brilliant warmth of the stars because i can’t think of anything more beautiful than hurting deep and still loving who you are and i know that you haven’t even found the strength to look directly at the mirror but good lord do me a favor and look up and look deeper because we are all tiny contained universes and instead of wishing you had been born as one where your fingers were strong and your teeth never broke on self-hating words and instead of staring at the moon and thinking that you will never know how to glow like she does hold your universe close and wear enough sweaters to keep out the coldness of space and tell yourself that this is your home and that even in the darkest places you will find your stars if you just wait.

I am 16. I’m dancing to my favorite pop song at my friends birthday party when a boy whose name I do not even know comes over and slaps my ass. My face flushes with redness and I sit down for the rest of the night avoiding the eyes of everyone in the room. Later, I ask him why he thought it was okay to invade my body without my consent. He says it was a joke. I don’t laugh. I am 12. Every girl in my grade is dragged to the school’s auditorium, where we are told that ‘dressing like sluts’ in ninety degree will not be tolerated, and that we will get two detentions if anyone finds our clothing distracting.  Later, I find out that, while we were being lectured on our own bodies, all of the boys stayed in their homerooms and watched a movie, because ‘It’s natural for boys to get aroused, the girls are the ones that have to cover up, they’re causing a problem and taking away from the education of others.’  I don’t understand any of it. I am 7.  I stand up at bat in gym class and blatantly miss the hollow plastic ball that is thrown in my direction. The whole class bursts out laughing. ‘You hit like a girl,’ one of the boys hollers to me. Later, I ask my female gym teacher why hitting ‘like a girl’ is a bad thing. She smiles at me sympathetically as she says ‘Honey, it just is.’ I don’t smile back. I am a girl, and since the day I was born, my gender has become synonymous to weakness, incapability, and inadequacy.