The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

You’re born naked, the rest is drag. —RuPaul

Guilt was a transcendental riddle

What did a 7-Eleven even sell that wasn’t designed to kill you one way or another?

What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?

“It’s such a shame we didn’t become friends earlier,” she said, grabbing my hand. “All this time, we could have been friends. Doesn’t that just seem so sad?”

I asked, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. That was a character trait of mine, the kind of curiosity that killed so many cats.

It was about finding your inner woman and letting her vibrate through you.

To tell the truth by lying. That was at the heart of realness, at least to me.

I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more.

Committed to this beautiful, fake, wholesome dream, because even though it was a dream, it was so much better than anything else.

I knew that sometimes people found themselves in a moment. They found themselves pressed up against themselves inside of a claustrophobic moment. And you couldn’t see how it really was from the outside.

But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back.

Is there a darker night of the soul than eighth grade?

“Things could change!” Ray Lampert said, and laughed. “Life is a fickle bitch.”

“Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,”

“Fear can change you. It can change you on a physical level. It’s not just feelings, it’s chemical cascades.”