Faith
by Ashe Vernon
“I believe in boys with sad eyes and soft smiles.
I believe in girls who roar back at the thunder
and still kiss like the first time they fell in love.
I believe in the people who’s skin never felt like home to them,
so they carved home out of the dust beneath their shoes
and kept on going.
I believe in all the ones who are told they don’t belong.
I don’t think I belong either.
I don’t know what it means to “belong”
but I know the ones shouting have nothing to offer,
that fitting in is the fad diet we’re all starving ourselves to.
I believe in us.
The ones who have never felt good enough.
I believe in the girl next door, who likes to be called “her”
but who woke up, today, with a gender that felt like
hand spun wool and spilled milk,
and who still doesn’t know how to tell her mother.
I believe in the ones dating the wrong people
so their parents won’t have to know
who it is they want to love.
I believe in a fear like that.
I believe in the kindness of strangers
and I believe that turning a blind eye
isn’t what makes you bad.
It only makes you scared like the rest of us.
I believe people learn to be brave.
I believe in the hands picking flowers as much
as I believe in the hands that plant them.
Because sometimes our hearts are too big for our bodies
and they like to go bumping against each other–
sometimes,
love doesn’t mean what you think it does.
You and I don’t love the same, but we are,
all of us, out here loving.
I believe in the collection of fingerprints you pick up
from everything in the world you have ever touched.
If I believe in anything,
I believe that that
is enough.”
“Because sometimes our hearts are too big for our bodies.”
I don’t know what to feel. I try to cry, but I can’t. It feels like the appropriate response would be to cry. I screw my face up (I’m an ugly crier. I’ve watched myself in the mirror several times), but the tears don’t come. I don’t feel like crying. I go through a list of emotions—troubled, yearning, heartbroken, heavy, light, hanging on. Nothing fits. But I am hanging on. I’ve been hanging on since the night I lay down and discovered that I was realer than the characters in my head.
The universe tries to make childhood’s end less of a shock by having the mat pulled from under us. It hopes we won’t notice. But we notice, and we’re falling. Betrayed.
I talked, for hours, to a boy today. He’s going to be a paeleontologist and a weapons designer. His favourite dinosaur is Spinosaurus. His second favourite is Megalosaurus. He loves playing Minecraft.
He doesn’t stand still. He tells his stories in skips and sways—not of his sentences but of his legs and arms. He isn’t like me. I wanted to be a paelontologist, but my favourite dinosaur was Triceratops. I swayed when I talked, but I hated talking to the older boys. I never ended up becoming paeleontologist. At some point, I realised I didn’t want to. But I want to want to.
Conversations about childhood I have with grown ups centre around the general lack of responsibilities and excess of time. I nod and smile, but it’s far from the truth. There were responsibilities of magnitude, and there was never enough time to fulfill them. The waxing crescent moon was the eye of a monster and we had to get off the island before it opened completely. We didn’t consider then that it would just close again and that what we were really trying to escape was the revolution of the moon, whose each cycle brought us closer to the real monster.
We were beautiful, because we didn’t know it. Time was the apple. We were Adam, Eve and the serpent. All we ever wanted, then, was to grow up, because we saw the adult world through the veil of childhood. Maybe the veil can be kept on—children can be saved from growing up by their Peter Pan, their Catcher in the Rye. Or maybe all children, like me, have no choice.
You must always be a child at heart, the grown-ups say when everyone’s looking. But inside midnight bedrooms, they probably know that to grow up is to grow up completely. But we aren’t children, and we aren’t adults. We can’t be adults. We can’t remember what we lost, but we can’t forget that we lost something, and we can never deal with that.
Friday Afternoons 