Girls like me are taught to treat our bodies like metaphors, we are taught that we can only be desired if we are oceans and hillsides, if we are Septembers and sinkholes. They paint us, all sunset eyes and nicotine, hoping to color us in with their washed out words, so that maybe we can mean something. We are taught to fold into ourselves, to shrink our waists and our voices, that being small minded will compensate for the space that we take up. We are taught to apologize for the space that we take up. Girls like me have to be thankful to the stranger who comes and dares to want us, as if we’re only worth our weight in love poems, as if he’s doing me a favor with his wandering hands. Girls like me fill our heads with shipwreck and sorry’s, hoping that this time it’ll be different. That this time, for once, love might be blind. That this time, for once, we can be enough. Girls like me are afraid of being enough. Because maybe if I think of my body as anything more than a graveyard, your ghost hands will find somewhere new to rest.