Here's what it is: I kind if like that I'm hard to bruise. That I can send my lovers home with their necks tattooed with the shape of my mouth but I look untouched. Not pure but maybe stone.
Here's how it is: I play with the edges of stone butch but never settle there. The most euphoric I feel in my body is during sex and I enjoy the pleasure and I tell my lovers sex isn't a competition.
Here's how it is: Sex isn't a competition but it's nice to feel valued. Desired. Fucked. Capable of making someone's afternoon a little better or a lot better. Of walking away unmarked.
Here's how it is: I resent that I have to preform my gender for other people but I only wear pants dancing. I still wear low-necked shirts that show off the curve of my breasts.
Here's how it is: Gender is always a performance and I delight in memorizing my lines and then reading them in reverse. I like to play the part that contradicts with the people around me. Or maybe that complements, matches. I win the Emmy for supporting gender roles and I want more.
Here's how it is: I want someone in my bed but I hate how empty the bed feels when they leave. I buy a weighted blanket instead. The marks of my lover invisible but sore to the touch.
Here's how it is: I saw an art exhibit at Mass MOCA and it was a room where the light was strange and the floor tilted and you couldn't tell where you stood and so the space seemed infinite, like there were no walls, no floor. I wanted to dance though the space and I thought when I see art, I feel the desire to create as a palpable, aching thing in my gut.
Here's how it is: When I tell my therapist I am a mess of contradictions, they tell me to imagine the grand canyon and just let my feelings echo across it, bouncing off its infinite walls. "There is enough space" They tell me.
Here's how it is: I chose they as my pronouns because the Walt Whitman line "I contain multitudes" cut straight into the softest bits of me. For me, they is a plural because I am a thousand conflicting feelings crammed into a beautiful and stone body.
Here's how it is: I am infinite but my time is not. My flesh is not. I don't know what this thing is inside me that people call a soul but I know I am divine because Tricia Hersey told me so and I know everyone I love must have that of god in them because the Quakers taught me that and the Jews taught me that god is light and undefinable and infinite.
Here's how it is: I am the stone walls of the grand canyon, worn away by the river. I am untouched by the gentle bites of my lovers but I am forever changed by a trickle of water, wearing against my skin.
Here's how it is: I am the echo of sound bouncing off of walls, getting quieter and quieter but never gone.
