Andrew White

of the topics above will burn you, I respect your decision to step away. Actually, I admire you—I’ve never been so careful.

Sometimes I pretend my fear is a little rabbit in my chest. It’s the sort of rabbit my brother’s school tests their techniques on, with grey fur and dark eyes, and it hides underneath my sternum beside the heart

Flesh and bone make more sense to me than the people they add up to.

How cruel is it, that I only get to be myself as a costume? I do not get to savor the masculine cut of my clothes, or the illusion of short hair, or the fleeting joy of my skin feeling like mine. Instead, I have to worry if my boyhood is convincing enough to keep me safe.

I peel at the edge of the world around the piece of statue. It comes too easily. With just a gesture, the world ripples the way a puddle would when you step into it, thrums like the bobbing of a swallowing throat

It always feels like there’s an anvil on my sternum whenever someone is upset with me.

The first time I dreamed of taking out my eyes, I didn’t actually do it. I wanted to, but I believed that when they were finally removed from my skull, you’d be able to reach into the socket and touch the brain with a finger; that without the eye, you could poke the gelatinous mess and stir it up like a soup. How terrible. How disgusting. How badly Mother and Father and my tutors would have wanted to do so if they thought it would change me

realizing that I could survive as a woman but only truly live as a man

A strange thing about being a boy like me is how difficult it is to untangle the truth of yourself from the world’s perception of you.

This always happens. Someone tells me to do a task they believe to be perfectly obvious, and I’m stuck struggling because not a single part of it is obvious to me.