Gathering

I’m eighteen and I’m standing in the doorway of your house

And you are telling me it’s just a phase

Couched in your scorn is implied meaning

That I am wrong to claim this part of me as identity

And soon I will realize it 

I’m not surprised to hear this from you

I didn’t come out to you anyway

I came out to the internet

This will become a recurring theme in my life

Spreading tendrils of myself deeper into the web

Every rejected part of me being given its place

Being Recognized

Received

Desired 

Secretive at first but gathering momentum over time

Letting myself be known by an accumulation of usernames

I practice allowing myself to exist in two dimensions

I collect these sips of nourishment

And sips become gulps and gulps become a deluge

Until i am bathed in the water of my Self

In this ocean I am carried away from your house

I am a jellyfish

And one day I feel my tentacles entwining 

With the fingers of my friends

We have all been carried here and I see them 

We have arrived 

They see me

The vulnerability of being truly known 

Comes like a light so bright it’s frightening

Maybe it will obliterate me but

I have come so far now all that is left 

Is surrender

And instead of death it is baptism

Our love is regeneration

Now that I am my Self

Now that I gather all my Selves in tender arms

I gather you as well

I gather the part of you that told me it was just a phase

For how could you know that with such confidence

Unless once you too felt this identity rise and request

To be explored to be loved to be known

And you said no

You shut the door

You buried her

You tried to teach me how to make a prison of myself

Because that was what you knew

I am lucky I was never a fighter

I never liked to work too hard at anything

And so when it got too hard to keep denying

I simply stopped

I let go

I am a slime mold

Growing towards food

And so I see in a way it was a phase

A phase I passed through

The phase of begging for fruit from a petrified tree

I would rather ride warm currents to an unknown place

And feel my heart begin to ripen