we are the essence of zero gravity.
you are the weightlessness in the marrow of my bones.
i can fly.
you are car rides with too many CDs and not enough miles.
you are lunar eclipses, ripped up jeans, and too-bright smiles.
pick me apart at my airtight seams to see yourself in the mirrors i set up inside of me.
i am a black hole and you are the answer to string theory,
smudged ink on fingertips while signing away the Earth for worlds our eyes can’t see.
you’re a mutant, baby,
evolved from the best of everything.

it’s the first day of a fresh new school year when
one of your teachers looks you dead in the eye and says,
“introduce yourself.”
your classmates,
familiar to you yet all somehow strangers,
scramble for some short snippet of a way to encompass everything they
have spent the past sixteen to eighteen years accumulating.
when it’s your turn and every eye turns upon you in anticipation for you to “introduce yourself,”
you taste iron in your gums and say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
and every last one of your peers agrees.
see, for the past three years every time someone asks me how old i am,
i start to tell them “fifteen”
and i don’t think that i’m the only one when it comes to this whole crisis of identity.
see, for the past three years i look back on who i used to be
and sneer at past versions of myself,
a babushka doll of self-loathing as i once saw it so eloquently put.
how am i supposed to introduce myself
if i’m going to hate what i see looking back in probably three months?

it’s some kind of family event or holiday when
one of your relatives, or friend of a parent, friend of a friend of a friend of a coworker,
looks you dead in the eye and asks,
“what are you doing with your life?”
your cousins are all too much older, family and yet strangers,
staring wide-eyed because they remember the horror of
getting asked this by every other adult in sight.
you take two short breaths and taste iron in your gums and you say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
and everyone rushes to assure you that it’s fine not to have decided yet,
as though anyone ever actually sticks to the career path they choose when they are just
eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.
when i was thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten,
took every single interaction as an attack upon my person.
i was selfish and self-absorbed and, quite frankly,
one of the most problematic kids that i know.
not in the “scene kid who won’t stop talking about anime” kind of jokingly problematic
but the kind of problematic where i thought it was okay to
repeatedly ignore a gay friend’s request to stop throwing around the word “******.”
how am i supposed to tell you what i’m doing with my life
when less than a decade ago i was everything that i have now come to completely
and utterly hate?

it’s a social event full of friend-of-a-friends,
people who are complete and utter strangers,
meeting you for the first time so of course
they’ll look you dead in the eye and ask you,
“what’s your name?”
suddenly your heart is in your throat because there is power in names,
power that you will never shake,
and to be quite honest you have too many names to pick just one.
in a split second decision you have to assign this new person as a peer, an acquaintance,
figure out who you are mutually in contact with.
when the silence stretches a beat too long,
you taste iron in your gums and say,
“i’m not sure yet.”
maybe this time it’s not as appropriate of an answer,
and all your friends are looking at you strangely.
see, everyone i know has a different name to call me.
my best friend calls me ‘jack’ and my mother calls me ‘claire.’
my teachers struggle to figure out which one i prefer.
see, once upon a time i read an essay about how names have power.
you summon spirits by their names.
you control demons by knowing their names.
an angel’s song is its name.
i tried to divide myself into tiny pieces so that no one could ever have full control over me.
i have accepted a handful of aliases and nicknames that i respond to
sooner than the one on my birth certificate
so that no one may ever own me.

i write a lot of poetry about not knowing where i’m going.
the problem with dwelling on these things is that i am still going,
going,
going with still no destination determined.
how long can a train go in a straight line before it derails itself?
how far can a train go before it runs out of fuel?

hi, my name is jack. i like
outer space and poetry,
physics and creative writing.
hi, my name is jack. i am
not an earthling-- my home is in the stars,
somewhere far away for which i am still searching.
the marrow of my bones whispers for me to just go go go go go--
but i can’t drive on the highway without inducing anxiety,
and i don’t think i’m quite smart enough to become a rocket scientist.
i’ve just got to cross my fingers and pray
that somehow they’ll pick me to revisit the moon someday.

when you click your heels and wish for home, where exactly is it that you go? i packed away all my ambition in manilla envelopes of faded dreams and sent them away to coral reefs so schools of fish a generation after me could learn from my mistakes. start saving for college when you’re six, a year for every digit, because if you want a higher education then you can’t afford the things that make you happy. (maybe that’s why nemo’s dad didn’t want him to go to school.) sew your stories into the patchwork quilt of your backpack slung across your shoulders and never trust someone that you can’t touch with the tips of your eyelashes.

(start wearing mascara so that you can pretend that everyone you love is close enough.)

when you look up at the stars at night, tuck them into your lint-lined backpack pockets and keep the stardust there like secrets. (no one ever keeps secrets.) sprinkle those stars onto your shoes and hope that pixie dust flies you faster than Southwest or Spirit airlines. mailboxes don’t go in reverse, so everything that you’ve sent away doesn’t tend to come right back without being stamped in red. NO ONE LIVES THERE. ADDRESS NOT REAL. SANTA DIED IN THE SECOND GRADE. nemo, go home. nemo, go home.

(cross my heart and hope to die for i have lived a thousand lives each covered by a constellation that dot-dot-dots me right back to the deepest shades of blue. how different are astronomers from oceanographers anyway? we’re all searching for things that everyone else is scared of finding. we’re all searching for things that don’t exist but have to.)

destination: still figuring it out. destination: a desert built from a river that ran out a long time ago, from everyone that ran out a long time ago, a delta of broken dreams peppered with sandcastles of stories that never saw completion. destination: roswell, because i’ve always loved road trips and maybe UFOs will be more comfortable than the backseat of my carolla.

destination: home. maybe these heels will figure out what that means by the time i’ve finished counting: one (home), two (home), three--

(home).

i spent the back half of freshman year as a ghost, drifting through these halls without ever touching anything, haunting my own bones with nothing more under my skin than an echo, watery lungs and glassy eyes that couldn’t see past my own transparency. floating. i don’t like to talk about it.

i spent the start of sophomore year as a zombie, revived but not quite alive again, less like glass and more like porcelain, trailing my hands along the murals and trying to feel again. i existed, but i was still searching for existence. in january i found pieces of myself in a meteor, and in amethyst geodes and lunar eclipses i found that i was less undead and more E.T.
either way i didn’t feel quite human, like i was off by two shades, so i doodled UFOs into the corners of all my notes and wrote poems about people who smiled like stars in the halls, whose laughs made me feel like i was finally home.

i’ve spent all of junior year driving. nothing feels okay in the same way that leaving does. highways sing lullabyes with road signs, other late-night cruisers sending Morse code messages to the helicopters overhead. i don’t have to think.
i’ve spent all of junior year side-stepping every single pestering question about what i’m doing with the next ten years of my life, signing away my soul to banks for student loans, all for a degree that statistically i won’t even need down the road for anything past sharpening my job resumes, like “hey, look, i’ve got all this debt in the pursuit of a higher education, please hire me.”

i’ve spent my junior year catching up on breathing.
i’ve spent my junior year catching up on sleeping.
i spent the first two years of high school half-dead and fully awake, chugging along like a train destined for nowhere, nothing.

i want to spend my senior year moving.
i want to spend my senior year running.
i want to spend my senior year finding life through expelling the ghosts in my bones and burning the skeletons that always left dust on my conscious whenever i reached past them to get t-shirts out of my closet.
i want to spend my senior year shouting.
i want to spend my senior year knowing that i am already everything i ever will be combined with everything i already was.
i want to spend my senior year forming galaxies with my fingertips.
i want to end my high school career knowing that there is a universe of possibilities inside of me.

i spent freshman year as a ghost, but ghosts are best used as metaphors for memories,
and something i’m best at is forgetting.
there are days where i still feel like a zombie, but who doesn’t feel like that at least every single monday morning?