My dearest Katlyn,
I love the way that sounds. I love the way your name just flows off my tongue like it’s the most natural thing in the world. To me, we are the most natural thing in the world. I believe it was fate that brought us together all those years ago, when we were nothing more than innocent children. Now our innocence has been stripped from our bones and our bodies have developed along with lines of laughter and worry across our faces. Yet you are the one, who after all this time, I still cling to. Back then, you were my rock and my safety net in a new and confusing environment, not much has changed.
Our history is a rocky one, to say the least. It’s full of drama and heartbreak; but as well as love and passion. I swear we could add a little embellishments and have our own soap opera. Despite all the troubles from our past, I hold those memories dear. Because when I recall those times, I don’t just recall arguments and words thrown, I recall the way you stumble over words when you’re flustered and how red your face gets when your choking words down. As for our better times, I worship those memories as if they are held upon a mental shrine; protected, never to be tampered with or tainted. There are things I have come to regret. I regret not swallowing my fear and being proud to tell everyone, “This is the girl I love!”, but during those times, I wasn’t ready. Although, our hidden love did make sneaking around so much more exciting. Sometimes I wish we could go back in time about three years and just show ourselves then that it was okay and it turns out for the best.
Things are more than okay. You are the love of my life and the one to spend forever with, however long forever may be.

A metaphor… love is a metaphor to everything of beauty. I found my metaphor in her arms. Her not a he and this is the things that we as human beings don’t comprehend. Love owns no gender, love owns no rules. We’ve been taught through life that there are certain kinds of people who shouldn’t be accepted when in reality we all are the same. Who I have sleeping in my bed in my arms at night owns the right to be who they are not who the world expects them to be. I found my metaphor my love. She opened a door to my heart that I thought only I had the key to when in all truth… I owned the spare she has the original. I was placed in a world where so many told me I had no place in being because my he was a she. My love owns no gender only a one person deal her name slips off of my tongue onto my pillow at night as I dream of the day I can kiss her in public and the stares will melt into a standing ovation… a day that I soon hope will come. Her heart owns mine, nothing in this world could take that from us. Only father time. We don’t know when or how we will die but I do know that I will find my peace by her side. When she dies it will be the most beautiful thing because nobody has ever died with their heart still beating… but this girl when she dies she will be alive within my chest, within this thing she calls hers. I am a girl and she is a girl but together we are the world. Society puts a warrant on the heads of the innocent who only try to find themselves in a way that they’re too simple to understand. Love is too complex these days… said nobody ever. Love is love no matter the gender no matter the *** recognition. You are who you are you love who your heart tells you to love. Changing to fit someone else’s perception of love or to be who they expect you to be is something I’ll never be able to do. I as a human being own the right to fight for something I love and believe in and that is her. I believe in her I love her I am a part of her as she is a part of me. Not even surgery could remove her from myself. We are merely two bodies with one soul and two separate minds. The problem with that is she constantly runs through mine. The world tells us that we are wrong… but something this wrong has never been so right. I’ll fight till the day I die to show the world our love through our eyes. Our love… something that no guy could supply. I have fallen for her, and fallen is a term used so loosely. This girl shoved me off the edge of a cliff only to jump as soon as she did, grabbing me by the arm rolling her sweet body underneath mine as we fell to our fate… she is my fate. It’s way too late for society to tell me that who I am who I love is something so wrong. They dispute our feelings for one another as if it’s debatable. My life is not a political meeting you cannot tell me who I can and cannot be with. Society sees it as just another “phase” I’m only here to show them that yes throughout our life’s we go through stages and phases that soon we grow out of only to find our final phase who defines us as who we are… I have found my final phase and society here is the big ******* to you because she’s the one who my final phase shall be spent with. Her touch is like no other, the way her hands slide over my body purely out of love. How she sees me in ways that I couldn’t possibly dream of seeing myself. Not only does she touch my body and make love to my body she undresses my thoughts as she watches them walk throughout my heart. She kisses the scars I’ve left on myself inside and out. The way I let society tell me who I was supposed to be, how listening to them almost destroyed me… took me to the point of no return no turning back now I have to take this wonderful weapon with a bullet in the chamber engraved with Katlyn the one who never came to know who she was in this cruel world… instead she was the gun and her heart was the bullet piercing through my mind and my soul creating the only thing that I’ve ever known. I found my metaphor in her eyes, the ones that shine so bright as they stare back into mine. I swear I can see the future through her beautiful deep brown eyes. I lose myself in them and pretend that I don’t know where I am going just to be able to stay a little longer. I long for the day when we’ll be united as one by the state and how we can declare our love to this world on paper… although it’s just a paper stating something we’ve known all along. I was born to find this girl in my life at a time where life was no longer my dreams where I had fallen to my knees begging for someone to take the knife away from me before I ended something so precious to someone I hadn’t had the chance to meet. In the same day I had taken that gun and placed it to my brains she sent me a message saying… I fell for you the first time I saw you. You tell me what you’d do… a girl you’ve had your eyes upon for so long and in your mind knowing you’d never be able to love the way that she so deserves messages you telling you that you are her future in this world… Society can let me bend over so they can press their lips to my sweet *** and kiss it firmly because this girl… this girl was born for me as I was for her. Kimberly is her name… and soon she’ll be my everlasting metaphor

To the girl my life revolved around
The girl I love to death
And miss more and more each day
With every passing breath
Every time my heart beats
It aches a little more
For your touch
Your kiss.

April 14, 2008 was a Monday. My family had just moved into a new house, we were starting a new life, and I was starting a new school. I was 10 years old then. I thought that moving schools and leaving all my friends behind was the worst thing in the world, the worst thing that could ever happen. I didn't realize it then, but moving was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. At Mulberry Elementary, I was put into Mrs. Bell's fourth grade class. I remember the principal standing behind me with her hand on my shoulder as I tried not to make eye contact with all the faces who were staring at me. I was terrified. I think the teacher could tell how scared I was. She sat me beside of a blonde haired girl named  Katlyn. I was an over weight, ginger kid with glasses; and Mrs. Bell knew she was the only one who would be nice to me. That year, she was the only one who was nice to me. I remember thinking how weird this girl was with all the faces she made. I also remember being confused, because the way she made me feel inside, was something I had never felt. Soon enough we became best friends. We were inseparable. Throughout the years we have gone our separate ways, had a couple of fights, and even more kisses. It was always you I came back to in the end. They say that love is kind, and patient, and works in mysterious ways. And now there's one more Love to add to that.
One day in fourth grade, I took her hand and looked her in the eye. I about broke down as we promised to be best friends for forever and sealed it with a pinkie promise. Today, I married my best friend and sealed it with a kiss...and a pinkie promise.

2013,
This is for you.

The year started out in hell.
There was family drama,
Fights,
Court dates,
And DSS.
Then you kinda leveled out.
I met a boy,
Named Devin,
And he ran my world.
I discovered and came to terms with something,
During that time I was with Devin.
I came to terms with the fact that I liked girls too.
I came out to him,
And my closest friends,
And then eventually my mom.
Not everyone liked it.
All year I had been taking stick pins to my skin,
And making little scratch marks.
After that,
I moved to razors.
I had always had anxiety,
But I would have 3 attacks,
Within the span of a day.
At school,
I got bullied,
And beat up.
At many points during the year,
I wanted tp end my life,
But I didn't.
I'm still here.
Almost at the end of the year,
I started dating my bestie from 4th grade,
Named Katlyn,
But then things spiraled out of control.
Life is still hell,
But things are getting better,
Im starting to pick up the pieces.
I hated 2013 with a passion,
But I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world,
Because its the year I became me.

Coming out to my family was more than difficult.
I hated myself and felt as if I had let them all down.
That they wouldn't accept me.
The day it had happened, I didn't plan for it... but I was violently dragged out of the closet by the roots of my hair and un-understanding looks and stares crept over my body for what seemed like forever but couldn't had been any longer than thirty seconds of nothing but a burning sensation throughout my body.
Their eyes traveled over every inch of me.
They didn't speak, and then again they didn't have to, their eyes said it all.
It was mothers day, and at the time I lived with my aunt who sat with my grandmother who approvingly shook her head and told my that all ******* shout be dead...
I sat helplessly listening to all of the derogatory words fleeing from their lips as if they were bats from the hell they said I'd go to for loving girls.
My aunt asked me "what do you "like" about women Katlyn..." as if she were a therapist about to solve all of my problems with talking it out only to try and play reverse psychology on me.
But what she didn't know is all of those 16 years I'd spent in that dark, lonely, un-needed, ridiculous, stupid, figment of societies imagination called a closet that categorizes someone's anxiety and fear of showing their true colors a magnificent rainbow because of the hate and discrimination that would flow out of them like this poem flows out of my heart.
I spent all of those 16 years trying to come up with things that I didn't like about women because that seemed more simple than what I did like... all I had come up with was that I couldn't love them and be open about it without someone hating our love and lust for each other.
So I answer my aunt with this " I like nothing about women, but love everything about them. I love their personalities, I love their physique, I love how strong that they have been created although it is people like you who doesn't support them that ends up breaking them into a fragment of the woman that they truly are, I love how their hearts are beautiful and a story book ready to read if you give them the time and attention that they not only feel that they need but deserve, I love a woman's smile when you call her beautiful, I love how a woman's eyes tell everything about her, I love how a women kiss with their lips so plum and passionate, I love how women come in all different shapes and sizes and how every single shape and size defines them all as a beautiful, mystic, and **** perfect being, I love how all women are unique and how not one woman is exactly like another, I love how a woman clenches her thighs around my body as we declare our love by caressing ourselves over each other becoming so close that for that moment that we are making love we become one human being, how I get a fever from the friction our bodies make against each other, how I melt into her as she flows over my body in the bed that you bought me. I love how they make me feel the way that no offence but a man never could. I love how women tastes and how mine left little morsels of her pleasure on my sheets and you touched them with your bare hands and you sit there claiming that being gay is a disease... all I have to say is if that's the case, you've been contaminated and you have my disease of loving women and now you are as gay as me.

The sidewalk seems to grow longer the more that I walk.
Leaves blowing in the wind, scratching at the asphalt.
Baggy shorts a t-shirt covered by an overly large hoodie, a backwards hat and DC's.
Sideways looks begin to consume me.
Silent comments are spread between them as they double look me.
My body reads a young girl in her teens, while my clothes read just the opposite.
Me I'm a different breed from what they're used to seeing.
Mixed emotions control my being, forcing tears into fleeing from my tear ducts.
I skip high school daily, I can't stay there the hate drives me crazy.
I thought if anyone could handle it... that it was me.
I was forced into believing that being me was some sort of disease.
I cry myself to sleep in a crisis facility that isn't for me.
My cries are silent, the same goes for me.
I leave them speculating what goes on within me.
To others I am far from perfect, to me I will one day be perfect when I shed this layer of female and grow into a picturesque male; like caterpillars shed their cocoon and become in tune with what they were destined to be.
Only then will my soul be able to live in complete harmony with my body.
Others only see a girl trying so desperately to be a guy... a young lesbian in their eyes.
Truth be told I am a woman on the outside and a man on the inside awaiting the day that I can be turned inside out and sprout out what my heart always said to be.
They don't understand me, they claim it to just be a phase that all people go through... but for me this "phase" is never ending.
They are wrong to tell me that it is just a phase, that's like me telling them that their sexuality or their gender is just a phase and that one day they will grow up into the person they were born to be.
You are born already knowing who you are within your own heart it just takes time to grow into that state of being.
Life is a series of phases, in my life being a woman is the phase that will soon pass as I transition into the young man I was all along.
People like me tell me to be strong, I listen but sometimes it feels as though I am... alone.
I'm singing to the choir this much I know.
But when will I be able to say that I am at inner peace with myself.
When will I be able to stand in front of the mirror and see the real me staring back ready to marry the lifelong decision of changing my ****** gender into what I deem is me.
I was born by the name of Katlyn... I grew up into this world by the name of Nick. They question why... my answer is, I am just a butterfly.