Standing on the Edge of Summer
12:33 a.m.

I close my eyes and I dream of you. I think about your soft skin, your doe eyes, the beauty mark on your wrist. You could never understand why I loved it so much.

Simplicity. Summer days by the post office, laughing about how my white girl skin would burn. Sharing lip gloss because we're both addicted to the waxy, artificially flavored sticks of petroleum jelly. Fountain sodas from the pizzaria. I cried because you wouldn't eat pizza with me. You said you were too fat to eat. I cried because someone had to weep for the lost beauty that had died in your eyes.

I cried because you wouldn't show me that you cared about me. I knew you loved me, loved me more than life, which made it all the more painful that you wouldn't show me.

You're a girl. What I would give if for one minute I could leave my skin and be in a man's body, be able to walk down the street holding your hand, and no one would ever have to know that it was little old me inside except you. We would walk hand in hand past crowds of people who could never comprehend love without limits, love that has no sex or race, love that is pure. We would walk past people who would never feel anything as pure as what we have. And I mean HAVE. Because you can hide it like you always have, you can marry him tomorrow and it still won't matter, because nothing's changed. Not between me and you. I see in your eyes the joy you have with me, and the pain that you can't be WITH me. And it's the same for me. It's the cruel pain of having found the one and never being able to be with them.

No one understands. Sometimes I wish I could run away, just run until I was somewhere where no one knew me. I know you feel the same. But no matter where you go, you will find me. Whoever I am with, you will have me. You hold me in the palm of your hand. Hold me, please hold me, because I'm floating through the space and there's no floor for me to put my feet down on. My soul is broken loose, and it's floating, broken from the tether that held it down to everything I thought I cared about. It should be better now, it should feel different somehow, but nothing changes. Take my love, and do with it what you will. Throw it away, hold on to it, take it into you, but please, please, never hand it back to me. Because I will choke on it.

<< - >>