A spoken-word piece tracing one person's emotional life from a seven-year-old crush through puberty, heartbreak, and therapy. The poet uses dragon-and-goblin metaphors to describe romantic disappointment, explores the impact of a missing father and confusing gender narratives, and concludes that identity isn't a puzzle to solve but an ongoing story being written.
When I was 7. When I was 7 years old, I learned what a crush is. I felt for somebody before I knew my own body. I chased her brown hair across the playground, and the way she turned around and stared at me gave me butterflies before insects had arrived in my vocabulary. I told my mom about her every time she picked me up from the car line. She would smile. And say, you're too young to be trying to map a way for a girl to enter your heart. Your card to love hasn't even had time to start. I smile and put those words as my foundation, hope it keep my form straight like my spine, but in the back of my mind I thought, I'm just more grown than she knows. But I wasn't. Skip a few years, I turned 13. That's when fear entered my psyche. They called it puberty, but to me all this chemical did was raise my anxiety to a level it's never been before. My whole life I was told to ignore what they call birds and the bees. Women are more than just things. It's evil to look at people like they're just breeze. Animal terms, because that's what men are. This was pumped into my brain like air pumped into a car's wheel. Extreme airflow, pray nothing will poke it and provoke what it was forced to hold. Missing father figure, so women meant the world to me. And a brother seemed like an enemy. Until a girl from my past hurt me so deep it partially broke the mirage and the dam to my eyes as I began The girl I previously saw in my past now seemed like a dream as she seemed to grow actual wings and fly around and through my life. And then I decided to capture her as mine, and that's when I realized she wasn't an insect but a fire-breathing dragon. And in front of everyone, she told them I wasn't worth a fraction of her treasure. She was guarding her heart against a goblin, and I'll never meet her measure. I was a goblin. Was it the woman or the men that I should flee? I started chasing after the fragments of myself. My identity kept seeming to outrun me. That's when my mother came up with a lovely idea: therapy. Therapy. Find yourself by allowing someone else to analyze the information you give them. Holding back things too sensitive because even though they should be a blessing. A blank slate, a speck of color stains the solution for thee. You, old pronunciation of you, because that's how they made me feel. As if I was too old, as if they heard this one before and were sick of talking to someone from the nursery. It's not that their answers didn't feed me, it's just it opened more doors to more entrances, an exponential increase of questions, but a decline in sanity. Was I unsolvable? A puzzle missing pieces? A voice calling out into a void? And maybe being unsolvable isn't a curse, but a sign that you're still being written. Maybe being unsolvable isn't a curse, but a sign that you're still being written. And maybe the fragments that you're chasing aren't meant to form who you are, but meant to form who you're becoming. And maybe your identity isn't something to catch. For something to create. Because in the midst of the chaos of questions, there is a quiet kind of freedom to be a story unfolding. Thank you. Woo!
