Pride

The first time I saw her,

I was seven. Baby blue plastic counter.

waxy cream floor. The wood-colored

handle of the fridge at my spine.

“You’re going to be stupid.”

He didn’t say that precisely,

but she did.

Her counsel a sullen robe

around my then-thin shoulders.

I balked at the force of her wings,

pitch colored and fierce,

battering the breath from

My then-small lungs.

Again, at eleven:

“You don’t belong.”

I countered her blows with

My mother’s confident words:

“There is something wrong with

them, not you.”

And at sixteen:

“He doesn’t want you. You are

Hopeless.”

“He is hopeless!” I wanted to think.

But projections are daggers held

aloft only by the strength of their

wielder. She would have me know

my own strength.

At eighteen:

"You're not queer enough."

"I am in a relationship with someone

who has a vagina!"

I protested.

Nevermind that.

At nineteen:

She looks at me

in the waning light,

where cicadas adamantly claim

their right to burn as brightly

as they can imagine;

in the limbo between inky sky

and swift sun, where everyone

has but a moment to make something

Of their lives.

She is done hiding beneath my

bedside table, where my dusty

dreams bury their cries and

confide in her, the mistress of

strife.

I thought self-doubt looked like

Pride to the world outside of myself—

that if I could hurl colorful façades

over my shoulder as I ran,

she wouldn’t find me, and neither would

I.

My life was not a lie, but in the

soft, spongey spaces between dreams

and beta states,

she would catch me, snatch her chance,

and rake her claws through my visions

and declare: “you cannot dare!”

Are you confused? I am too!

My armor is so beautiful!

Aren’t my feathers unreal?

Don’t you believe in fairytales?

But she finds me anyway, in the rising

twilight, where I can barely see,

where trees greet me

with their potent green

veins. It is in those moments

that I wish I could bleed chlorophyll

like them—not this ruby iron.

Her hair is like starry silk, thick

like my favorite blanket, and so black

there is no end to it.

“Who are you?!”

I wanted to scream.

She was there, staring me down

as I made a fool of myself

at Karaoke two weeks ago. She said,

“There is no tomorrow for you.”

Her eyes like deep heartwood

of osage, saying, “No poems

will pull at your fingers.”

As darkness eclipses the sun,

she awakens and confronts me.

She says, “You will amount to nothing.”

And so, I let her sleep in the loft.

I bring her breakfast at seven-thirty-four

in the morning and speak of my grand plans.

She scoffs, but I have learned to

carry on.

She doesn’t interrupt my thoughts

anymore, with her cavernous maw

of fear, merely leans into my words

like a curious cat.

She bites and scratches me sometimes,

but only when I forget to listen to her.

And today, she told me why she found

me, twelve years ago, in my grandmother’s

kitchen.

“I know he didn’t say exactly what I did,”

she murmured over her café con leche.

“But if I didn’t, someone else would have,

eventually.

You see, we live in a world where limelight

is sparse for those who do not fight

for themselves. Pride is about the

willingness to be right about yourself

even if it looks wrong to other people.

even if you have to braid your heartstrings

into a bowline, because weapons can

Make beautiful music too.”

She eyed me over her mug.

“You are a product of your

upbringing. But his words did

not carve deep lines into your

back—mine did. I wanted you to know

the force of your own mind.”

“But why did you blind me to

My own brilliance? Why accentuate his

claims of my cerebral demise?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Look around you. The ways

of this world are brutal. You

needed me to teach you a difficult

truth.” She reached for my hand with

her scaly talons.

“If you can look into the eyes of your

Own fear without flinching…

If you can weather a story of your own

Making for over a decade…

If you can listen to your own pain

Until it unravels in your small fingers…

You will no longer fear the fading

light between what others see in you

And the liberation of your truth.”

I could not stop hearing those cicadas

that night, raucous creatures. And it was

true: Not only could I stand the vastness

of night, I had the strength to walk

along it's deep winding trails.

I was still frightened sometimes.

But I brought every terrifying foe

I found to breakfast the next morning,

and coaxed them into friendship with tea

and scrambled eggs. I listened to

their stories. And I learned.

Every night, my parade grew in

color and shape, and my loft filled

with laughter, sorrow, and understanding.

I saw too, that the world around me

was as twisted as the roots I learned

to navigate by night, but that did not

make it less beautiful.

And that is how I learned the meaning of

Pride.