Putting all my words here for safekeeping. My name is Tara. Non-binary, anarchist, life-giver, learning how to be a person.
When I was young and sent to my room for some indignity I’d cry as loud and as long as I could
My mother would tell me, with spite on her tongue, “sometimes I think you like to be sad.”
I didn’t cry to be sad I cried to be heard
But sadness kept me company, and held the comfort of a truth
that no one would be coming
but they should they should
Grief of time passing by of plans unmade life undone settling on my bones the well-worn weight of it reveals the shape of me a soft embrace whispering it’s ok to be
For seven days I heard a voice in my head speak a truth I didn’t know I had been seeking
louder
and
louder
until it had cleared away all the thoughts from my brain
until I could hear it echoing deafening off the bedroom walls
until I could only answer in reply
yes
yes!
YES!
until it covered me with joy and my heart turned inside out
and all the parts of me found their way home
Did you know there are people who have feelings?
Did you know there are people who have feelings that just show up like they have a standing invitation to the feelings party?
Did you know there are people who have feelings that they would like to share with other people who have feelings?
Did you know there are people who have feelings that speak and not the things that burrow into your body and gnaw at the walls of your stomach until you wonder if you have cancer
or the things that slide along your bones and bind your flesh so tight you wonder if you are made of stone
Did you know there are people who have feelings that move and dance and cry and sing and not the things that fold in and collapse into a black hole inside you, threatening to swallow the world if you open your mouth too wide
Did you know?
I didn’t know I didn’t know No one ever told me
Someday you will die and no one will know that you stayed up too late because you were avoiding the trash
Someday you will die and no one will think about whether you had a house or how you kept it
My body is leaking information words overflowing from my brain slipping out silently between the sounds of our conversations
flowing neatly, swiftly, through the tip of my finger as I scroll on the phone falling begrudgingly into my morning coffee, plop, plop, plop to be swallowed back down again
they are littering the floor piling up on the stairs they are churning churning in my head and twisting up in my hair
I want to gather them up
I want to pour them into the cracks of the world letting them grow thicker and thicker until they pry apart reality and reveal what is underneath
I want to pour them onto the page and watch them arrange themselves into a truth
I want to gather them up into the shape of me so I can show you and say, “see? see? now do you see?”
but they slip through my fingers as I walk down the hall they slide down the drain while I cut my hair over the bathroom sink they get lost in the piles of dirty laundry that do not care about me
and so I leave them, silently
In the mornings in that moment of waking before the world becomes real I would be filled with a feeling like a delicious secret settled in my bones and I'd think, it must have lost its way from a dream and I'd wait for it to flee as consciousness revealed its mistake
But I would wake and it would wake with me and it was real and I was real
For seven days I heard a voice in my head say, “you don't have to be a woman” louder and louder until it had cleared away all the thoughts from my brain until I hear it echoing deafening off the bedroom walls until I could only answer in reply yes yes! YES! until it covered me with joy and my heart turned inside out and all the parts of me found their way home
Rejoicing in rain blue skies heaven sent hopeful souls dance for a moment, reborn
But what souls still cry for shelter from the storm? what souls have left us to mourn?
Cloak yourself in faith, my dear steel your heart with joy we know not what the future brings but it will find us here