girlhood is clinging to each other, heads on laps and intertwined fingers.

girlhood is crying with each other, over love or sickness or the depth of life and the end of it all.

girlhood is eating ten potato chips, nine cubes of cheese, eight skittles,  seven apple slices, six chocolate chips, five small pickles, four carrot sticks, three ibuprofen, two cookies, and one tangerine.

girlhood is feeling a desperate need to get out, go far, be free.

girlhood is realizing your friends are similar to you but also so beautifully and insurmountably different.

girlhood is figuring out how to be good in a world that thinks there's nothing you could do to make that happen.

girlhood is rolling on the floor laughing at the dumb romcom playing on the tv.

girlhood is ignoring the yelling from behind you, walking faster even if you think you'll trip.

girlhood is sitting in the school office after getting dress-coded.

girlhood is hating someone but defending her to any length when a boy wants to say something bad.

girlhood is having weapons within reach.

girlhood is scary, beautiful, confusing, meaningful, formative, trivial, important, connective, loving, hating, all the feelings all at once.

girlhood is ours.

i am in love with the wind
she does not know my name
i feel her drifting past me on warm spring mornings
cooling the air until i can breathe easier
i roll my windows down and feel her in my hair
as if i had grown wings and learned to fly
does the wind have a name? she is astounding and radiant
sometimes i imagine her watching me over my shoulder. i smile
the wind will live forever, though i will not. will she miss me?
i can't be the only poor girl who has fallen, can i? will she notice?
i push those thoughts aside, deciding to speak up for the being i want
she will know my name if it's the last thing life allows me
maybe we aren't meant to be, maybe we are
all i know is that i am in love with the wind

i am in love with a girl
she thinks i do not know her name; i know more than she can imagine
i follow her where she walks in spring, observing
her breath is forced, but i can ease her struggle
many girls dream of flying above the tallest skyscraper
but her, oh, when she dreams it i am up at once, whipping by her
i have no name, but the things she calls me bring color to our faces
i keep watch, protecting her from the world and the world from her
she is melancholic often now. i think i know the future she pictures
she thinks i will not notice her absence,
that i have not grown to need her in our time together
she has begun speaking to me, and my heart swells with her devotion
if only i could respond in ways she understood,
tell her i know her better than i know parts of myself
we are meant to be, i know it. even if we are never together i will
know all that we could've been as one
all i know for sure is that i am in love with a girl