By Lucy Parr
My cat sits at my feet
his claws hooked into my socks
and the skin of my feet,
curled up and content and I won’t
go anywhere despite the sweet pain.
Far too much has already been said
about the unlinearity of time,
philosophers and physicists and
all of us queers. I guess
I’m a redundancy, but nonetheless-
I can’t tell a story without getting the time wrong.
I am twelve or eleven or thirteen
I have been told that bleeding is good,
a sign of fertility and growing up and shedding
golden, halcyon, tarnished youth.
I am twelve or elven or thirteen
and I am in my bedroom bargaining
with a creator I am sure exists that I don’t
bleed. I’ll do anything to keep it from happening
but if I do, well, that’s just life, isn’t it.
I am fifteen or fourteen or seventeen
and I am joking with my sister and
surreptitiously, furiously googling terms on my laptop
late at night.
Things like “How do you know you are gay?”
“Gay quiz?” “What is asexuality?”
I am trying to check out boys and girls
and feeling very little besides
aesthetic appreciation.
I tell my bisexual sister,
“I guess I left all my
sexuality in the womb for you!”
I am defined by an absence.
I am fifteen or fourteen or seventeen
and I stumble upon a thought, my entire
life, already being upended
(not that upendedness was not
the default already.) And I am wondering,
“Am I even a girl?” I know
I have no desire to be masc
(I think) and I really love makeup
and I am fourteen or thirteen or twelve
and I am looking into the mirror, my hair
in a middle part and slightly wavy
thinking “Do I look like Jacob from Twilight?”
And I am nine or ten or eleven and looking
at my much shorter friend, already perfectly
feminine, feeling like a clumsy, giant
imposter beside her, mimicking her likes
and interests, and crushes,
but never quite loosing the feeling
of playing dress-up with her entire being.
And then I stumble across a forum
where trans medicalists are talking about
killing “trans trenders” and
as I am catapulted back to the reality
of already being different in the south.
That, was that.
And now I am nineteen or twenty or twenty one
and I am taking a hammer
gently to that shell, cracking it
open with accidental, clumsy
violence. No longer
Too afraid to die to look inside,
and the inevitability of this moment
forcing me to smash open that
tarnished, youthful innocence,
to find that the yolk inside is golden.
And now, I am sitting at your feet,
my soul clawing at your skin,
at your whole being, curled up
content. knowing that
I won’t be going anywhere for the
absence of pain
Lucy Parr
they/them
Age 23
From Marshall, Texas
Currently residing in Cleveland