I've always known what I wasn't, even if I didn't have the words for it.
Being called a girl, being called a daughter, being called a woman--it would sometimes shock my senses, like oh! Right. That is how I'm being seen. In silence and solitude the ambient noise of womanhood was less suffocating. All the memories I keep playing back and forth like a tape, I need to--
...I really need to break the truths out from the lies.
The crawling feeling under my skin was always, always from realizing I've been noticed. It wasn't as intense when I was younger, when a child could still be ephemeral and unfinished with their identity, but the onslaught of the differences between boys and girls only got harder to ignore. I was already repressing my magic the best I could by the time these differences began to matter socially, so for hiding I needed to use more mudane ways. I couldn't literally be invisible, but I could make myself unnoticable--even just temporarily, hoping that it would be enough for those times when I tried to drop my mask that I'd be able to bear it.
It was never enough. I was seen no matter what.
The shirt is more fitted, as are the jeans, and I know that he is checking out my body. He takes the lead again because that's just what boys do. I've found my hands can't decide where they want to be because this abrupt step into a life came with a bizarre finality, an unconscious internalization of realizing that is the place that I am taking, and that is the role that I get to have. He asks me if I want to go back to his place and I say yes, because by that point if I couldn't be a pure and virginal girl or good daughter who never got in trouble, then I could try to be the only other alternative I knew. It tried to come up again briefly with Mark when he panted the word beautiful right into my ear, and I tried to ignore it because I did not want to be beautiful. I wanted to be strong and kind. I wanted to feel powerful, and I wanted to believe in that feeling. The whole time I was dancing on the edge of realizing what the final epiphany was.
Making the connection specifically that I wanted to be a man was hard to dredge up from being on the receiving end of the most confusing, painful, and outright stupideset expressions of manhood I've experienced. Pa: swallowed up in his own solitude and an increasing pressure from outside forces that none of us were able to understand. Vesa, who'd shove his tongue into the mouth of a drunk girl and Thorn who'd let that happen. The guys I've been with in college, on the hunt for something shallow and sweet and short-lived; enjoying the prime of their life in a society that doesn't condemn them to disorienting, black-and-white morality. I knew what I wasn't and not yet who I could be, so I tried on other means of existing. Cool version 2.0.
I stopped hiding and started saying yes. I would say yes, and allow myself to be seen as, touched, and then fucked as a woman supposedly freed from the constraints of social judgement. I just thought if I said yes to it all enough times, that constant background noise would finally start to feel comfortable.
...As I thought ealier, whatever else it's done to me will have to come up later.