August 21, 2017.

I was born into a world of absolutes.

The sky is blue. The grass is green. The boys lie.

I drank them in like water, strengthening my just formed flesh. These were known, rather than felt. But still, they were true.

The mom loves. The dad works. The families function.

After years of knowing the bees sting, I was finally stung on the playground outside of classroom three. I experienced the searing pain in slow motion, like the moment before an impact, the knowing and the feeling finally meeting, hazy and bright. They were right, when they told me it hurt. But no one had told me that the bees die.

I learned to cling to facts, hanging on with my tiny fingers even if it felt like I was dangling from a cliff. They armed me with the steel wings of an abridged bowling lane; they kept me from falling into the gutter.

I knew that if I kissed a boy, I would get pregnant. I knew if I kissed a girl, I’d go to hell. I knew that if I wandered too far, my mother would scream in that high-pitched way Greek mothers do, as if the supermarket floor had turned to soup and was slopping over the edges of the Earth, eager to join the sky’s runoff, longing for that meeting place somewhere yet unseen.

In fourth grade, they taught us the meaning of “if, then” statements. If I am this, then I am that. I filled up pages and pages of dotted lines with facts and figures, each deserving of their own gold star.

If I am sad, then I am choosing not to be happy. If I am hungry, then I am pretty. If I am the right kind of girl, then I am wild, but tame, hair flowing behind my back, but in a manageable way, sea salt staining my perfect skin, rigid with morality but soft to the touch. If I am the wrong kind of girl, then I am almost everything else.

This I knew.

In high school my friend said to me, all of my greatest friends are Leos and they are all assholes. If I am a Leo, then I am an asshole. I am a Leo.

The teachers told me if I cared about my education, then I’d show up. When they spent the first thirty minutes of the class rolling up their sleeves and drinking in their hot waters, telling us to sit and be quiet and read, I stopped going.

If they cared about my education, then they’d show up, I thought.

I knew I talked too loudly, had too many opinions, looked at people too sternly. They said if I was smaller, then I’d be perfect, so I turned myself to liquid and sank beneath my floorboards. I oozed between the cobwebs and the broken screws. If I can take up the smallest space, then I am the smallest space.

If, then.

The first boy that showed me attention, who grabbed at my skin with sticky fingers, who folded his lips around the smallest corners of my body, told me, if I loved him, then I’d let him do with me what he wanted. When I promised I loved him but wasn’t sure, he punished me by joyfully jamming his uncut fingernails inside me for an hour. If this is what love felt like, then it hurt.

I wanted out from beneath the canopy of knowing. I wanted to feel, too. But the world pointed its fingers at me and told me I couldn’t afford to leave. I walked up to bank windows and shook hands with every locked door. They laughed from the inside, hoarding their money like candy, like piles of food, like clean water. Finally, they asked me to turn around and bend over as they piled stacks of paper on my back, caressing me with promises of blank checks. If I default, then I am yours, I said gleefully, with a flourish of my electronic signature.

The real world had its own set of absolutes, but it wasn’t sharing them with me. I dove into its secrets, hoping to figure them out. But feelings were scarier than fact and I wore my rules closer to my body, strapped to my limbs like weights in the water. I allowed myself continuous movement while going nowhere, often knocked over by the current of those around me.

I swallowed their words, their stares, their touch, their semen.

The men told me that if I was just a little prettier, I wouldn’t have to be smart, and if I was just a little smarter, I wouldn’t have to be pretty. If I am neither smart enough nor pretty enough, then I am neither of those things at all. I became less feminine, a little harder and a little angrier.

If they can’t break me, then I can’t break.

I stopped looking down, instead staring into their eyes. If I lost my nerve, I shifted to the spot just above their right eyebrow; backing down without letting them know it.

They called me a bitch, sassy, mean, cold. A control freak, as they went about their day, grasping for control with their long hands and small dicks.

I came out from under the floorboards and curdled by the radiator, hot and bubbling. Summer came and the radiator became too greedy, always asking to hold me too close, stifling me with its needs. I slid up the bed frame, circling the twisted sheets before allowing myself to take over the mattress; king sized and alone. A stranger on the train grabbed me close and shoved himself into the back of my body, whispering sharp words into the nape of my neck. I responded by consuming the mattress, crunching on springs and strings, spitting out flowery pillows, dressing myself in bed skirts.

I ate all of my books. They told me I knew less the more I learned, told me how insatiable I was after a lifelong acceptance of hunger. I expected promises like the Bible, absolutes and truths, and instead ingested theories and questions and a stunning lack of rules. I grew bigger as I shed layers of myself.

The mirror laughed at me until I stared at the spot above its right eyebrow. My closet burped with the knowledge of things past. My coats called to me with the promises of winter, with wrapping myself up tight and disappearing in the snow. But I ate them, too. I ate my way through the hallway, the living room, the building with its numbers “152” scrawled on the brick outside.

I became a girl who was just sad, or just happy, or just awake. I kissed a girl and imagined what hell was like; if it tasted just like this, sweaty and sweet. I dressed myself in the trappings of the wrong kind of woman; my hair became unmanageable, my skin became wild. I defaulted and wrote the bank a check for the detritus at the bottom of my purse; a memo line consisting of “lint and old gum.”

On my twenty-ninth birthday, the sun called my name. It said, be like me, bright and earnest, overpowering. Hurt others with your glare. I stared into it until the sky started to explode, until my eyes started to drip down my face. I told the sun, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

It shadowed itself with the moon, allowing me just a moment, telling me I can also be soft and tired and quiet and dark and whispered back,

Yes you are. Absolutely.