Femininity came and settled onto my shoulders like a backpack
Put there by the hordes of faceless figures
That drape you in silence and expectations
Compliments and slurs and small exercises of power
Full of sticks and stones and twigs and rocks and words
That don’t ache immediately but get heavier and heavier the longer you wear them
“Don’t you look pretty today”
Thank you I feel like another person
Has crept into my skin and gradually started
Changing the locks.
I think of when I am eight and a child who doesn’t know any better
Laughs at me in the playground and tells me I am wearing boys clothes
A stripy green top and little brown shorts that I chose myself
And I stand there as he runs away, feeling like a joke that I don’t understand
I am ten and my aunt squeezes my hand and tells me gently not to eat another slice of cake.
I try to fold my body up like rice paper quietly, slowly.
I am twelve and tall men start yelling things at me on my way to school
Picking through the main roads like a fugitive, praying they don’t try and follow me, that my maths test goes well, that they’re serving chips and I don’t get taken on my way to school.
I am fourteen and I stop playing the football and basketball and hockey and swimming.
My lungs slowly get weaker and sometimes I find it hard to breathe.
Later on I realise just how many of my friends grew up and did the same –
Made themselves small and compact and digestible
Contorting ourselves into plastic wrap packaging, all ready to be stocked and shelved .
Time passes and maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.
Because soon I’m turning twenty and I realise maybe there is joy as well as suffering that I’ve found in the box I was put into when I was born.
And also maybe it’s a box I can climb out of, taking the things I want to with me,
And the people that have found me in the darkness of this small space.
