I am washing the sheets,
from so much overflowing love,
from so much sweat,
from passion found.

I wash the sheets,
of a beautiful early adventure,
full of communication,
sincere affection,
and flames.

Your smile and your gaze
lit up my mornings.

I wash the sheets,
because today we must say goodbye,
because the universe brought us together,
but the voice of society tears us apart.

Where a woman's feelings
are accepted,
but a man's are a sentence.

A sweet reflection,
that a dark part
holds onto us.

Where a woman can cry in broad daylight,
while a man destroys himself.

Abuse of repression,
for emotions left unvalidated.

I am not something strong,
I am not fortitude,
I am a human consciousness.

Society, I do not seek your approval,
but for my soul to be heard.

I did not need to fit into a mold
for my manhood to be accepted.

And let values be more expensive
than success.

I wash the sheets,
for my past wounds.

Sheets of a farewell,
for my expectations created.

Sheets of oblivion,
because even though there was fire,
our stories did not intertwine.

Sheets of hope,
that I will sweat,
because someone better awaits us tomorrow.

White.
Female.
Middle Class.
Heterosexual.
Agnostic.
Libertarian.

Yeah.
That's me.
That's that first layer,
thin as the paper you could
read it on.
Just a
Jane Doe,
a nameless, faceless
demographic.

But peeling back the layers,
ripping through page on page of a complicated novel,
digging
down
into
a
bottomless
hole
to
China,
unravelling
­the intricate
web of
stereotypestruthsliesassumptionsprejudice
and
there you will find
me,
a colorless genderless asexual
spirit whose frame
is crafted and molded
not with how the world
chooses to see me and
who "they" deem me to be;

no.

A guy that didn't know me well
once told me that I
spoke more urban than he
expected,
and I couldn't help but wonder why
someone from an urban area
couldn't speak like they were
from a city,
like somehow what he saw in my
whitefemaleheterosexualmiddleclassagnosticlibertarian
prolog­ue forbade me
from speaking in colloquials and
abbreviations.
Oh, I apologize,
I laughed later to my friend,
law students are supposed to speak
with an ostentatious vocabulary and
an heir of
(superfluous) arrogance.

I am rarely a prototype
of what it means to be
White,
of what it means to be
female;
middle-class* or not,
my parents insisted at age 8
that I begin to understand
the value of a dollar;
my sexuality indicates little
about my level of attraction
to the world around me;
agnostic is really just a term
I put because I'm still trying to
figure out whether I really
believe everything I was forced to
learn at Catholic school;
and isn't Libertarian just a fancy
word for I don't want to
choose liberal or conservative?

It's insulting to
ingest how much is
insinuated about
my depth in
the shallowest of pools.
My cheeks burn hot
with frustration as I
try to balance on a beam
cracking underneath the weight of
a world that is constantly begging me
to go back in the neatly
wrapped package from which
the world would prefer I
came.

I'm not someone
you can put in a *******
box and
label;
you can't contain my
shine behind
blackout blinds;
I will burst out of your bubble
and break your glass ceilings;
I will scream at the top of
my lungs in a soundproof room
until you HEAR me.

I'm not meant to be judged
by my cover,
and neither are you.

We are meant to be read.