On the one side is a a boy, with skin that reminds me of lined notebook paper with eyes that fade from freckled green to ocean blue, like the waves in encinitas and hair the color of an exploding tangerine and I wish
I could hold him in the moment when his face was inches from mine and all I could see was two tunnels of light escaping our cheekbones and his smile
And how I believed it
On the other side is a future, filled with queer potlucks and girls with sun-rich skin, hair done in braids with colors reaching towards the earth, with people who look like anyone except my father and I wish
these images were not mutually exclusive.
I wish I was not crying over spilled conversation, about the world the white men I sleep with live in
But from the moment I was born I have been trying to be someone, and I could never put my finger on it. I still can’t. But I feel like I’ve broken all my own bones trying to make myself into a particular kind of beautiful, one for other people, one for white men and time and time again they just see right past me.
And this really shouldn’t bother me, because the truth is this has been happening all my life. But maybe I don’t have the mechanism to explain something that is stuck inside me. Maybe that’s why his words leave me dry heaving in the bathroom during lecture. Because I am half the girl from a nice suburb in a small town, because I grew up reading books about girls like Holly Golightly, Daisy Buchanan, Margo Roth Spiegelman, Alaska Young, Summer Finn, Sam from ‘the perks of being a wallflower’ and I guess I really didn’t realize how much of that defined me until I got here.
I’m almost 20, and I’m this shade of myself I never thought would be a real thing. I literally dj on the radio in the middle of the night and I have a room decorated in postcards and apple cider packets and I drink tea with every meal and I just submitted a print pitch to a magazine about sex four minutes before the deadline and I do cartwheels in the busiest part of campus I severed my headphones yesterday in my bike chain I teach a poetry class and I drive too fast and I wore a flower crown to class one day and everything about me is tied to this one moment I remember with vivid clarity when I was in the 7th grade, and I was outside on the track during practice and I remember the dead green brown color of Colorado in the winter and I remember thinking
I want to be interesting
I want to be the kind of interesting that brings men to their knees and so
Here I am.
Except I am the one so often on my knees and I am the one constantly feeling broken and looked past and
I keep wondering what I do wrong.
Maybe the mistake is in not being hollow. In being a complicated mess of experiences and emotions, in being a hurricane of watercolor pastels, so much so that we are sitting outside yali’s at 9:43 and he is telling me about julia fox, and how julia fox is “pretty hot” and I really can’t stand these men I sleep with telling me about the white women they find attractive because I am not those women
I am me, I am me without makeup in a sweatshirt in the morning for you
I am me naked between the sheets of my bed for you
I am me, making space in the gaps between all my commitments for you and is it not enough?
Is it never enough?
My body and my words and my spirit and all the wild and beautiful things I say how do you stay untangled
How do you see me, and not see the world?
And I hate it because I am still half that girl who grew up wanting to be a girlfriend. I am that girl who was hypnotized by white hollywood and led astray by my sisters, by the way I saw my father in such glory
But I am half Berkeley-chick, as the man in the dinosaur costume would say. Half ethnic studies major, half watching women through the lecture hall windows and wanting to touch them the way men touch me but
Men don’t touch me the way I want to be touched, men don’t hold me just to hold me and white men don’t see in the world what I see in the world. They don’t notice the bodies that have been burned to hold them up, they don’t smell the burning flesh when we’re making love, they have no idea what it’s like to be the housefire. They live in a world I cannot afford but I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t always trying to belong to it still. That I don’t drop everything and give my whole being to every open car door or half assed attempt at romance. That I don’t speak as much as I’d like to spare you the discomfort of my truth. That I was so much more before you whittled me down with your lips and I hate that I am always letting white men split me apart like this but I am half
Daughter.
And some part of me will never feel whole unless I am validated, held, cared for by someone who reminds me of the man who validated, held, and cared for my mother. I ate white savior cereal for breakfast half my life and most of the time I still want to be saved
I want to wake up not having to think about the bodies
About my body
About the smell of burning flesh when he fucks me
I don’t want to think about the guilt, about the disgust, about the filthy insides of my intestines that betray me time and time again for not doing better. For settling for men who don’t see me
In all my glory.
So I’ll keep waiting for apologies that don’t come I’ll keep
accepting mediocrity as effort I’ll keep
Dreaming of a future where I can love someone who doesn’t look like my father and feel whole.
Where I am not a mess of stained bedsheets being left in the morning, but the gentle warmth of a blanket to which someone clings at night and maybe that someone will look like the men I grew up being taught to love maybe, they will look like me.
Maybe I’ll find a way to fit my person inside my body, write a poem that feels more like a poem, make something other than love with my broken, hollow bones.