I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

In middle school, my only queer friend taught me to use the word family when identifying a queer stranger in public. As I got older and gayer, I heard a lot of talk about chosen family, but I didn’t understand why something so beautiful had to be compared to family. Why couldn’t it just be its own good thing?

Q: What do you know about distance? A: I know that I feel it everywhere.

I disliked the word troubled, but that was the word the school assigned to any student with a lick of personality.

Dolphins dance and weave under the waves. I envy their freedom, how all they have to do is dive deeper in order to make their shadows disappear.

I hadn’t understood the tenderness of climbing into bed with you after a stretched-thin day.

Of falling into a dream before we could properly kiss goodnight, but knowing the kiss was still there, hovering between us.

If I had to choose, I would say the moment between when you decided to kiss me and when we actually kissed, that is where I wish to live forever. Inside my anticipation, dying to receive you.

I only want to be the light for the humans.

Tomorrow, I decide, will be better. Tomorrow, I will recover from today.

I never feel like I know how to live in the world. Only on top of it, hanging on as it spins madly.

Some days, I cannot find the start to the toilet paper roll, the start to anything.

How do you define freedom without ever having felt fully free?

My head feels the way watercolor looks when it bleeds. I wish someone would come dip their brush in me.

I often wonder what would have happened if I never met you, if I’d ended up with someone else. How our lives would have played out.

“At least you were there for every milestone,” I say, thinking of my mother. My mother whom I love even when it is least convenient.

You need more than any one person can reasonably give.

We are putting on an incredible performance of survival. Where is our prize?

More about octopuses: they can taste a person’s body chemistry through their skin. I cannot imagine having to taste everyone’s depression and anxiety.

Q: What would you tell your younger self if you could? A: The future is a place you can never catch up to.

I have no idea how I am going to talk to the kid about her extra shadow. About mine. How did parents do it? My parents must have sensed my queerness, possibly as young as three, but instead of sitting me down and saying, We love you, we love you. Here’s what you need to know about the people who won’t, my father ignored me, and my mother redirected me toward princess crowns and pink frilly dresses. If I ever run into her again, I might drop the word femme into the conversation.

Q: What is the difference between nice and kind? A: Only one is a result of fear.

Everyday decisions immobilize me—what to eat for dinner, which order

to run the errands in, what to watch on TV. How could anyone expect me to make the big ones, the life-altering ones?

“How can we trust our own impulse to be forgiven? There’s this epidemic. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but Person A will apologize to Person B so that Person B will continue to perceive Person A as a good person.”

It was a song about choice. About loving someone so much you’d spend another lifetime with them, knowing you could easily choose someone else, go down a different path, chase the euphoria of the unknown.

We is the most tender word I know.

In this world, you learn to hold the good days and bad days together in your lungs, and you don’t dare breathe out, for fear that in releasing the bad days, you’ll also lose the good ones. On the walk home, I think, this has been a good day.

You’ve stamped me forever, like a library card,

Shame, as I understand it, puts a question mark at the end of every observation.

Like a dream funneling out of my head, I am already losing the details of Siegfried.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

I’ve heard it said that love is choosing to listen to how someone’s day went at least thirty thousand times. Love is saying, I am here, I am paying attention, and I care about that fight you had with your coworker.

“No one keeps you alive except for you and your promise to yourself.”

I worry I will lose it all at any moment, but I keep my exoskeletons to myself.

“Funny—it’s shade when you need to escape the sun, like under a tree. But a shadow when they hate us,” she says.

there are no rules tonight, there is only celebrating something the Department doesn’t want us to celebrate, and maybe it isn’t much, but our bodies, dipping and diving like currents of energy throughout the room, feel like small sparks of resistance, our miniature revolution. These moments of joy belong to us and no one else.

What I’m trying to say is—I’ve never been afraid of anything more than I’ve been afraid of my own happiness. But I want it, oh I want it. Something tells me it isn’t happiness without fear. This small fact keeps me breathing and sleeping.