Juliet Takes a Breath

by Gabby Rivera

How do you tell the people who breathed you into existence that you’re the opposite of what they want you to be?

But I fall asleep with that book in my arms because words protect hearts and I’ve got this ache in my chest that won’t go away.

It felt like my body was both overexposed and an unsolved mystery.

We lived loud and hard against a neighborhood built to contain us. We moved like the earth pushing its way through cement sidewalks.

She smelled like all the reasons I didn’t want to say good-bye, not even for a summer.

It felt like Washington Square Park in the summertime, minus the frenzied pace and designer suits. Bustling and free: a place to smoke trees and fall in love with someone wearing too much eyeliner and not enough deodorant.

To love another woman is to look at yourself in the mirror and determine that you are worthy of the galaxy and its fury. To love another woman is to love yourself more than you love her.”

I wished I had that type of free-spirited strength that goes with calling people out on the ways they’ve wronged you, loud enough and public enough for the world to feel it too. For me, everything was internal. I had all the what-if words and fuck-yous in my heart, but they didn’t ever come out.

And many of us move in this world with the beauty and courage to write our stories on the backs of napkins and at the edges of our sanity so that others may find strength in our words and know that our lives belong to us, not a husband or a father.