adonis

I saw my soul in a deer and he was so afraid he stood and stared and we were equals we the wide-eyed and unquarrelsome we the only two awake under the moon it is a marvelous thing to be known so intimately words cannot fit my soul they tip onto their sides like clay jars, overfull and fractured against the ground and I spill out i spill out of them, through the cracks and the thin places i spill out and I cover the ground and I apologize for the stain I leave like cheap wine on a new rug i saw my soul in a deer and I was afraid afraid to offend him to scare him into running to spook him from where he stood in the moment where we stood, between night and morning, between species, between worlds, we were silent. and the silence made me known and I was at peace. in the still eyes of my soul

my plant is dying a potted plant, a miniature rose bush. i dislodge a leaf or two every time i move it i don't mean to, they're just unable to hold on to the stem. it's trying to bud, to bloom, to live. so i don't know how its death is simultaneous. i've done my research: i've watered and sunned and all of that. i've been nothing but good to it. everything it needs has been freely given, and still it dies. my plant is dying and i begin to understand my mother

i was not born in the wrong body there was no mistake. my body is my body and i would not trade it these are my scars and i let them tell my story, written on the paper of my skin: listen. they call it cracking your egg when a trans kid realizes they want to change when a little girl realizes he isn't when a little boy realizes she wants to be pretty in that way her sister has always been, in the way she's always felt underneath baseball jerseys and monster trucks and baby blues that never meant a thing. i was always afraid to let my egg crack, afraid i would crawl out limp-winged, unattractive unfinished unnatural. abomination: the word echoes in a mother's voice i remember her eyes were wide, terrified as she told me how i would burn if i turned from the light that was scorching me anyways. i refuse to fix my body as if it is broken as if it is not the "true me." i have rebuilt redefined, replaced, but i am not fixing anything, I am aligning i am falling into place i am finding what fits where like broken pottery become mosaic my body is not the enemy we are given the gift of autocreation- reinventing what means "me" because i am the same as I always was this is my ship of thesus- i am no new vessel i am just mending the hull i am just stretching, stitching, sewing the sails that the wind blows full they become my wings- damp and chrysalis-new on nights when the streetlights were calling my name on days when my pulse and my breath caught all of my blame i was just fighting through chrysalis walls I was beating and tearing at the eggshell membrane i was gasping for air with blood under my nails and i was a ship without sails and i was born in the right body because sometimes the right body is a trans body and mine is a temple, one I have rebuilt renovated repainted one I can now call my home a home where I do not need to sneak out of windows or muffle my footsteps, a home where I am not afraid to love who I am a home where I can exist unconditionally

we are here and the world around is brave and broad. we are but mapmakers, darling. we are but adventurers in our own miniature universe. your touch is a compass, your smile the star by which i chart my course they guide me when I wander too far and lose the way they tug me gently back. I follow the roads of your veins up to to your chest, where beats a heart that counts the days and nights in our world. our world- our perfect, private world, where we do nothing but live and live and live. let the sun never set on our throneless reign of this ink-line kingdom. your fingertips trace the cartography of me, drawing the delicate world onto parchment skin. I reach for you to do the same, yearning to memorize everything you are. i want to touch the lines of your scars, following them like paths to places unknown. I want my hands to remember your face, the valleys of lip, jaw, and throat. beneath my fingers is a world i could only have dreamed of. there is adventure here, my love- an ignorance that intimidates and intoxicates. we follow the dotted lines. with eager, untiring feet for there is promise of a home at the end a place where roads converge and rivers meet the sea. a place to stop and look back at at how far we've come. a place for us. we will be home.