I spend most of my year in self-effacement. Head down, hand up, a ghost who whispers answers to the lost. They take it; without a second thought, glance, judgement and leave the drooping girl in shades of grey to her notebook of lies. Poetry, prose, fiction, all of it is falsity straining towards enlightenment, in feeble attempts to discover itself, words stumbling into awkward rhymes hoping to somehow fall... into truth.
Then I do an about-face. Suddenly, out of nowhere, my hair falls into perfectly shaped golden locks around a painted face. A mask of melanin and mascara allow me to play a different part: one of laughter and physicality, one of reality and presence. The person I become in the summer months of heat, and sweat, and flesh believes that to be found, you must first endeavor to get beautiful, tragically lost.

“I am a hurricane,” they say
With gasping breath
With trembling hands
Trying to assign themselves power
Anger
Destruction
Immensity
Through the words they write on a page
Type on a keyboard
Fingers playing with words until their shape resembles those of someone
They have lost
Themselves along the way
To escape isolation they have found community
Compliance, uniformity
Home
I am not a hurricane
I am a baseball stadium in the rain
After everyone has gone home
Because they knew what the outcome of the game would be
Without waiting to see it end.
No. I am the little girl
Eight perhaps,
Blonde hair tied back into two plats
Sitting in the bleachers
Face wet with what she hopes is just rain
She doesn’t know why she is crying
All she knows is that people make her feel very alone sometimes
And maybe it doesn’t matter
And maybe it does
So she sits there
Dripping
Breathing in the smell of the earth

Slowly, she rises
and walks
towards the pitchers mound
uncertain feet hop-scotch-jumping to the top
From there she is the top of the bottom
There is mud on her sneakers
And blood on her knees
She doesn’t know how it got there
All she knows is that when she looks up
Walls of empty chairs watch her
Waiting for something
So she picks up a ball
And throws as hard as she can
But suddenly I’m not a tiny child
Shivering in the rain
Throwing baseballs for ghosts
Im a fifteen year old girl
Who thinks she’s all grown up
And when the empty seats ask her to give them a show
She doesn’t listen
Because nobody else does
And maybe blinking in rhythm with the sound of his heart
Or hopping across side walk cracks
Wont keep them any safer
But she feels like it does
She feels like she’s doing something
Maybe its enough
Maybe its not but when the voices come out at night she knows to
Listen
To the sound of her own heart beat
And slam
Her book closed
Her fist against his chest
Her head against the wall
Because listen
She is the only one who can keep them safe
They are her monsters
Hers to destroy
Hers to cherish and cling to when everything else has left
She is their hurricane
She doesn’t want to be