Black is Not a Color

I.

The bossy kid with the runny nose

two seats in front of me in the

third grade was the first to break the news.

It can’t be your favorite color. That doesn’t make sense.

You have to pick something else.

I picked it anyway, taking my marker with childish rebellion and

shading my paper darker than dark.

If it’s not a color why is it part of the box? I asked,

but he was already complaining to the teacher about me.

II.

At twelve, I began to notice I could not hear myself in

the shapes of the words people used

to describe me, could not

recognize myself in family pictures;

my childhood wish to master the superpower of invisibility

was granted, in the cruel way faery princes trick human

children.

for years, I searched for myself in the spaces between the

words I read, curled up in an unlit room.

I grew to cover myself in black, erasing the deceitful curves and

uneasy lines of my adult body

III.

Eighteen,

I will never forget the cave in Ireland where the tour guide

told us it was very important to keep the lights on, because

true black made people insane. For a second, he let the lights go

to exemplify this, and my eyes lost purchase, the world spun.

I was afraid

but I was also free, my mismatched parts absorbing back

into the dark: head of a woman, heart of a man,

soul of neither.

IV.

the curve of someone’s body has never made me stir,

even when my neighbors’ gardens were shot through with

little red buds of desire, for touching and sucking that made

my stomach turn.

I thought they were lying when they told me I had

something missing;

no matter how my fingers groped I could not find

the hole.

V.

my heart has never sped at the thought of another person;

I have never craved the presence of another body beside me

upon waking.

They say this means I must be lonely,

that I just don’t know what love is.

but sometimes when I stay up past dark on the roof with

my sister,

sometimes when I walk alone on the street and watch the lights

go out one by one,

when the rich dark slant of a chord of faraway music hits

too close to the bone and fills me to the brim,

I know that they are wrong.

VI.

Thirty-two,

in June, I travel freshly tarred streets the same inky hue as my boots,

walking through rainbow banners, the smell of air after rain,

the sounds of celebration buzzing through me, filling me with

something like kinship, like

hope.

If the people dotting the streets in one another’s arms can be accepted

for who they are, maybe someday I can be forgiven for who

I am not.