road

broom people

I used to love pink. I loved being a girl, I wanted to be a princess, I wore pink dresses every day, pinkpinkpink. Since I got my period, it's been different. Suddenly dresses made me sick, my name wasn't mine anymore, my hair was too long, my face too big. When I was eleven years old, I tried on a dress and cried, my body begging me to wear anything else. I still wore the black funeral gown but I puked twice and didn't stop shaking for a week. What is this? It's been getting worse. My name has become a mark of Cain to me, reminding me that I betray the title of female. The broken glass feeling that dresses gave me, cutting me apart from the inside, are getting worse and worse and "she" and "girl" and "chick" are knives in my head that's already bleeding. My friends ask if I'm trans, but that's not quite it because I still love my hair and my face and pronouns don't hurt unless theyre "she" so what am I? I'm not trans, I'm not cis. Confused? The term that gets forced on anyone consciously different from the others? I feel at peace when I'm in nature. There's no expectations. The trees that surround you, the creek by the road, the dog down the street, they don't judge you. They don't want to help you. They're just existing. I just want to exist. 
I don't want to check male or female or other. They're not right. I don't expect there to be a right one because I don't know that there is a right one. I can't even label myself, how is someone else supposed to? Yet female destroys me from the inside out, male feels like a lie, and other feels too broad. I know I'm something, I just can't find it.
And my friends are so kind. They offer to call me "he" or "they" or anything to help me but they can't. I don't even know what's happening to me, so I can't expect them to know.
I want to be a babbling brook. I want to be the creek down the road from my house. I want to be the camping trip that my grandparents took me on when I was nine. I want to be sneaker's 15th birthday, talking with koral about the sadness that comes with double digits. I want to be the birds chirping in the trees. I want to be the car that passes you on a walk. I want to be 50 degree days like the one I'm writing this on. I want to be the broken road I'm walking on. I want to be transcience, moving from one place to the next constantly. But my unshakably human instincts tell me to settle down. To stay where I am, to never change. But the bird in me hates it. I want to be airports and unfamiliar fast food places after a concert. I want to be the acoustic guitar that you play during thunderstorms that make your hands shake and your heart race.
I want to be anything but who I am. I want to be a bird with hollow bones and the world in front of me.
But instead I'm this. This collection of lackluster memories with too much missing, this half soaked photo album. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I loathe it. But it never changes. I constantly try to change and it never works. And sometimes I don't want to. Sometimes I don't want to change and sometimes I want to run and scream and cut my hair off. These all coexist inside of me. I do not know which one is the best and which is the worst of me. I'm not even quite sure I know their names. I have called them skeptic, believer, and phoenix, although it feels like trying to tell three hurricanes apart from each other. They have their cores but the edges fade together until you're not sure what is what and who is who.
I am believer right now. At least partially. I always am in nature, especially this road. I feel my soul resonate with the creeks and brooks and the rocks and the poorly paved street. I want to lie down until I become a spirit, a dead leaf living inside of some hollow tree that a bird made it's home in. I should get going. I should get on with my life. But right now, I am a broom person. I am a wild animal, and a babbling brook. I am what I am, no matter what my head says.
I wish I believed that.