Bekah lazar
lesion
You’re in sixth grade putting on chapstick in the girl’s bathroom with other girls in your class all clumped around you, some of them with clear lip gloss pinched between their fingers, others with sparkly compact mirrors from Claires or Justice or even just Target; it’s the time after P.E. where you all cram yourselves into the dingy bathroom with cracked tile and leaky, squeaky faucets and stare at your uniformed reflections in the mirror like you want to reach forward and wrap your unpolished fingers around their necks.
Your school has a “hair up” rule—all girls must have their hair tied up in some way, pulled away from your face unless it’s short enough that such a feat is impossible. This is not the case for anybody in your grade: all the girls have hair to at least their collarbones, and so everybody’s hair is always in ponytails or pigtails or big, fluffy buns that nest on the tops of their heads.
No makeup is allowed either. It’s a strict, no-exceptions rule. One time your Best Friend got caught wearing mascara and your teacher, the decrepit tyrant that she was, made her wash it off in the bathroom. She’d grabbed your wrist to bring you with her and ran a starchy paper towel under the bathroom’s probably-radioactive water and grumbled swears under her breath that you knew you weren’t allowed to say. When she scrubbed the black coating from her eyelashes, it didn’t come out very easily, so she was left with dark smears that sank into the skin beneath her eyes and, even in her knee-length plaid uniform skirt, made her look far older than she really was.
You’re in that same bathroom now, packed into a small throng of your classmates, all of you picking your reflections apart the same way your sister picks olives off pizza. One of them takes a tube from her pocket, pops the cap, and twists the bottom to invite up a head of pink-tinted lip balm.
She applies it to her mouth and through the mirror, you watch. Her hair, even when hoisted into a high ponytail, is long and wavy and shiny and reminds you of the honey that comes in those cute bear-shaped bottles you like to gawk at at the grocery store. Your eyes follow the path the lip balm makes, how it trails a dark circumference around her mouth, and you can’t help but notice that she has two big front teeth like a cartoon rabbit and a cupid’s bow so pronounced you could sigh into the curve of it. When she’s done navigating the world around her teeth, she smashes her lips together to dig the color deep, push it in so far it stains, then gives the cloudy mirror a big bunny-smile. You haven’t looked at yourself once.
Then she turns to you, lip balm between thumb and index held forward in offering.
“Do you want some?”
And so you take it the same way you pluck the host from the priest at church, except this time it feels far more consecrated than a flat, grainy wafer. You press the same lip balm to your own mouth in a punch-pink baptism and in the sickly yellow light of the girl’s bathroom, she watches you. Makes sure you’re doing it right through the grumble of other girls fixing their ponytails or quickly patting on undetectable, translucent powder to control their sweat. You want to make sure you’re doing it right too, so you mimic what she did earlier: squeeze your lips together to evenly distribute the pigment, and when you do, you taste strawberry. It’s not a flavor you’ve ever liked, but now you want more, want to live in it, breathe in it, die in it, this artificial, plasticky taste of a new God you might suddenly believe in.
But you give it back to her. Like good Catholic girls always do. She takes it from you with a pleasant smile and puts the cap back on.
“Don’t tell anybody it’s tinted,” she says, and you nod wordlessly.
#
My mom stares at me from my room’s doorway while my back is pressed down to my green yoga mat. Senior year has just started and I tell myself that I need to get in shape, lose what I seem to have quickly gained over the summer. I’m trying to get air back into my lungs after a rigorous workout, but my mother is staring at me while I stare at the ceiling from my yoga mat and I am trying to ignore the fact that her eyes are drilling needles into my neck.
“I really do think you need to go to the hospital,” she tells me.
“I don’t,” I snap back, rough, grating, because she is my mother and I am sixteen.
“You’re getting bigger.”
“Do you really have to say stuff like that? Can’t you see I’m already trying to lose weight?” I’m sticky from sweat and my body hurts from all the sit ups and crunches piled into my muscles. I still don’t look at her, but she keeps looking at me, my mother.
“That’s not I’m—whatever,” she says with a huff, and then exits my room. “Fine. Whatever.”
I imagine slamming the door on her so hard the house shakes. Instead, she closes it gently.
#
You’re in seventh grade now, and there’s a New Girl. She has strong shoulders and blonde hair chopped to her chin and prefers to hang out with boys, especially the weird ones who like to spread their Pokémon cards out on the table at lunch and talk about anime you’ve never watched and video games you’re not allowed to play. You know all about Pokemon—you’ve even jailbroken your blue iPhone 5c into having a Gameboy emulator so you can play Pokemon Emerald during class—but these boys are strange and avoided by the girls who like to roll up their uniform skirts and put Vaseline on their eyelids to make them shiny.
New Girl doesn’t care though. New Girl laughs with the oddball boys and talks with them about Dragon Ball Z and sometimes forgoes her skirt for pants and is allowed to keep her hair down because it’s so short. New Girl clicks herself into the boys’ misfit squadron and the other girls avoid her as if she’s contracted something contagious.
But New Girl is nice, even if she’s cringey. She is nothing but kind to you, and so you are kind right back. It's as simple as that.
#
Some weekend into senior year, one of my best friends invites me and another friend out to the SF MoMA and I put on my favorite black tank top and a pair of denim shorts. I notice the tension when I button the shorts together and try to ignore it.
At the museum, my friend takes pictures with her high-quality camera: me in front of a rainbow-striped painting, me in front of a rainbow-and-black checkered piece, my silhouette against the pale blue light from a window. They’re great photos—they make my face look good and she’s always been good at capturing joy in the moment. But I can’t ignore the way my stomach sticks out, the bulge in my abdomen area while my limbs look frail enough to snap. It’s not just that I’ve gained weight—it’s that it’s all centered into one area, bloated and disproportionate to the rest of me.
“These are so cute,” I tell her with a forced smile, because it’s not her fault I look the way I do.
I attribute it to normal weight gain and remind myself to work out when I get home.
#
There’s a Pretty Girl in your class with milk chocolate hair and tan skin like you see on the women in the magazines at the Safeway checkout. She’s been in your class since you transferred here in second grade after your old school got shut down when the only teacher—a single nun who taught every grade in one classroom in the back of your church—died, and then all the students had to disperse. At some point during every school year, she Pretty Girl goes to Portugal with her family and comes back even tanner than before, and all the other girls fawn over the way her skin is tinted from the European sun. Your own skin also gets tinged gold during the summer, but you figure since it’s not from foreign sunlight it’s far less impressive.
Pretty Girl and Lip Balm Girl are best friends, tight knit, inseparable among the crowd of other girls desperate to be their friends too. Everybody loves them and everybody wants to be them and every time one of them speaks to you it’s more sacred than the communion you all receive the first Friday of every month. They’re both average at math but good at Language Arts, and when you were in elementary school they both did that thing where, when coloring a picture, they’d push the crayon down hard against the border of the image to outline it, then color it in lightly with that same crayon, giving it a shading effect. When you tried to do this, it came out looking like a cheap copy, and so you never did it again.
Pretty Girl is good at soccer and Lip Balm Girl is good at volleyball. They are girls who know how to run the perimeter of the parking lot you all do P.E. in two times without stopping. They French braid each other's hair and jump rope during recess and, when not at school, apply blush to the apples of their cheeks to flush them warm. You do not know how to do any of these things.
#
Not without a fight, my mother eventually drags me to the doctor—my pediatrician, because I am still a child, under eighteen. My stomach is rounder now, hard and inflated like a basketball, and despite my constant insistence that it was simply weight that I had to burn off, I find myself in a papery gown on an exam table, the walls around me painted with Dr. Seuss characters.
My doctor presses down on my abdomen, and it hurts. Bad. She keeps pressing and pressing and, embarrassingly, I’m trying not to pee on the damn table. Everything inside me feels wrong, suddenly, like all of my organs have been haphazardly stuffed into me and rearranged all tilted.
“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”
I laugh at that. “Absolutely not.”
She says something to my mom that I don’t register because my eyes are tracing the One Fish, Two Fish across from me. Humiliating, I think to myself.
“We’re gonna order an ultrasound,” the doctor eventually tells me.
“Ultrasound? But I’m not pregnant.”
The doctor shakes her head. Tells me yes, she knows, but something is wrong, and they can’t tell what and so they need to do some more tests. I go home with crossed arms, my mother in the driver’s seat, our thickened silence.
#
Pretty Girl and Lip Balm Girl sometimes sit with you and your Best Friend and other friends at lunch and when they do you imagine you are one of Jesus’s disciples, loyal as a dog, willing to wash the feet of those who have graced you. Lip Balm Girl is known amongst your class to be a fiend for Bagel Bites, and when she offers you one in lieu of the spam and rice your mom packed you, you take it with folded hands.
They are messianic and have never been particularly unkind. Not to you, anyway. When Pretty Girl gets seated at your table of four in History class, you say a thank-you prayer to a Lord that must be listening and embrace the glowing in your chest. Of course you want to be friends with them. Who wouldn’t?
#
Ultrasounds, I find, are one of the most uncomfortable sensations in the world.
My lower abdomen covered in a warm jelly, the ultrasound tech presses down on my full bladder as if she’s trying to make it burst. I’m holding my breath trying to not make that a reality while I watch the black and white visual on the machine’s screen muddle around in shapeless blobs.
The tech frowns. My mother watches the screen too, attention rapt.
“Huh,” the tech says.
“What?” my mom asks, more concerned than me—the person who’s actually slathered in goo right now. I’m supposed to be at school right now, but instead I’m water ballooned in a dark room; I’m not sure which one I prefer more.
“There’s something in there,” the tech says.
“What is it?” I ask.
She tells us: it looks like some sort of cyst clumped against my left ovary, that they need to run some more tests and do an MRI on my body invaded by an obtrusion that has no place being there. So I go home with my stomach still wet from leftover smears of ultrasound goop that escaped the napkin, an MRI freshly scheduled.
When I’m back in my room, I take my shirt off and stare. My stomach is bulging now, and not in the way fat naturally hangs off the bones; it’s strained and set, round, as if I’d swallowed a bowling ball.
I resort to only wearing oversized things from now on: big t-shirts, oversized hoodies. No more tank tops. No more body-hugging pants. Hide it away.
#
New Girl, like the boys obsessed with anime and Digimon, hates P.E. Like you, she’s not very good at anything you’re all required to do in P.E. Like you, she dreads it, and stays as far away from the center of the action as she can. You both run only one lap and stay on the outskirts of the parking lot and do not get any balls passed to you during the required games you all must play. You are fine with this arrangement.
It’s on a rainy day where you’re all relegated from parking lot to gym that you find yourself sitting with her on the sidelines. It’s a free day, which means the teacher just brings out a bunch of sports equipment and lets the class go nuts for an hour. You like free days because you get to sit on the gym’s borders and draw instead, as you are not good at any of the sports physical education inflicts upon you.
New Girl sits with you alongside a couple of the weird boys she associates with. You like her, and you even like the weird boys; they’re awkward, but they’ve got good hearts, and so does New Girl.
“Hey,” she suddenly says, and you look up from your notebook. All of the boys have their own notebooks too, drawing characters with big anime eyes and cats with cool patterns on their fur.
“Yeah?”
“Can I tell you a secret? You can’t tell anyone.”
“Of course.”
She leans in, cups both hands around her mouth in a cowrie shell to whisper me an ocean.
“I’m bi.”
The boys start giggling. You just blink. The sound of sneakers against vinyl squeak in the empty space between you.
“What’s that?”
“It means I like boys and girls.”
“Oh,” you say. “Okay. Cool.”
“Don’t tell anyone.” There’s a light that’s been switched on in her face, her eyes warm yellow windows.
“Of course not,” you promise, and you keep it.
#
The MRI machine is loud and awful and I’m stuck inside while they put on Madagascar 2 because apparently it’s possible to play movies in MRI machines now. There’s a foreign growth inside me apparently, so serious that they feel a need to stick me in this giant coffin surrounded by clanking metal so loud I can barely hear that obnoxious zebra talk.
“Is it cancerous?” I’d asked my mom earlier that day.
She’d taken a second too long. “Probably not,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her.
Something meddling in my uterus, then; an egg, perhaps an apricot or an apple, an intruder not welcome in the walls of me. I imagine taking a giant melon baller and scooping it out from me, cutting myself open to dig my fingers into my flesh and tear, all while I pray that the MRI machine can’t read my mind.
Forty-five minutes later, they pull me out. I don’t get the clanging out of my head for days.
#
You and your Best Friend are tucked into the treehouse in her backyard that’s rich with memories of prank calls, idle gossip, and every color of nail polish her bathroom has in stock. The plushness of the bean bag perfectly sculpts to your teenage girl body that lacks the curves Best Friend has started to develop. You’ve been sitting like this for a while now, talking about everything and nothing and everything again, until the conversation turns to the people in your class, as most middle school conversations often do.
“[New Girl] is so fuckin’ weird,” Best Friend says. “And annoying. I don’t like her.”
You pick at your nail beds. Both you and Best Friend’s nails are always bitten down to the quick. On some off day, you’d both vowed to stop chewing on them if the other did. That barely lasted a week.
“Yeah,” you say, and that’s that.
#
I’m back in a doctor’s office again, this time an OBGYN’s, an older woman with long, black hair tied back into a straight ponytail and cherry red glasses and nails. When she enters the exam room, she grins. “I remember you!” she says with a flash of teeth, because funnily enough, she also did an operation on me when I was eight. This is not my first time my body has seen something it didn’t want to.
She tells me that in my uterus is a giant ovarian cyst that, while not cancerous, has been swelling uncontrollably with fluid. I ask her how big it is.
“The size of a watermelon.”
I stare at her, stunned.
“Originally we wanted to do the surgery next Tuesday,” she begins, “but we have to do it now. Today.”
She explains that it’s a miracle it hasn’t burst yet, but it’s on the verge; it’s urgent that they do this as soon as possible, and so I am back in my mom’s car with that clogged silence, hands following the curve of my swollen stomach as we drive to the Stanford Hospital. Within minutes of arrival, I am put into a gown, a gurney, and then there’s the knife.
#
Pretty Girl and Lip Balm Girl are in the bathroom with you trying to curl their eyelashes with their fingers. Lip Balm Girl has sprouted a giant zit on her nose and is squinting at it with furrowed brows. She’d been complaining about it all day to anybody who would listen. Even though you’d all sympathized with her and offered her words of encouragement, nobody really cared. She’s still pretty, zit or no zit.
“[New Girl] keeps staring at me,” she says. There’s an air of malice in her voice.
“Ew!” Pretty Girl exclaims. You stare at the blackened grit between the tiles.
“She’s so creepy,” Lip Balm Girl continues, features contorting into disgust. “What if she likes me?”
“God, I hope not.” Pretty Girl turns to you. “Did you know she likes girls?”
You don’t know how they know this. You didn’t tell anybody, kept your promise with zipped clear-chapsticked lips, yet somehow, they are facing you with repulsion meant for someone else.
“No,” you lie.
“It’s so gross,” Pretty Girl scoffs. “I don’t want her looking at me.”
Their attention flits back to the streaky mirror. They go back to talking about something you can’t hear because there is cotton stuffed in your ears, your mouth, throat. When you exit the grime of the girl’s bathroom, back into the sun and the openness, you still can’t find any air.
#
The cyst itself was six pounds, four liters of fluid drained out of me. The doctor tells me that I essentially experienced a pregnancy without the actual baby, and they had to remove one of my fallopian tubes because the cyst had gotten so big it twisted the organ beyond saving. It had pushed around all of my other guts the same way a fetus does, squishing them together and against my body’s borders. It rendered me a bag of assorted meat and stretched skin.
And now it’s out. I want to see it, this monstrosity they gouged out of me; I want to hold it in all of its grotesque, this thing that pretzeled my insides stupid, but the surgeons take my request as a leftover-anesthesia-induced joke and don’t comply. So I never see it, the quasi-fetus my own body made. Still, there is the scar.
#
New Girl isn’t there for P.E. one day. Strange, because she’d been in class just minutes before. After running your lap around the parking lot, you find yourself searching for her, asking around. Even the weird boys seem to be missing.
“Oh, she’s in the bathroom,” somebody tells you with rolled eyes. “I think she’s crying.”
The weird boys have congregated outside of the girl’s bathroom—not in an inappropriate way though, and you know this because instead of snickering amongst themselves, they’re all wearing grim faces that don’t sit well on their unmatured features.
The middle stall of the girl’s bathroom is shut. You can see her white Converse under the gap between floor and door, and thick, wet sobs choke the already damp air. Unsure what to do, you stand there for several long seconds.
“[New Girl]?”
The crying stops. She sniffs.
“Who is that?”
You tell her your name. She starts crying again. Tells you how she doesn’t know how other people found out, that none of the girls will speak to her anymore, the way they shoot appalled glances in her direction. You say nothing, only shift around in your shoes and study the hard water stains on the taps that probably haven’t been cleaned in years. New Girl bears you her heart through a flimsy plastic door and in all your helplessness, you listen.
Eventually, she emerges from the stall. Her eyes are bloodshot and her nose is all red but she’s not crying anymore.
She sniffles again. “Thanks for being so nice to me.”
You don’t tell her: I have never known anyone like you. You don’t tell her: I didn’t know you could like anybody other than boys. You especially don’t ask her: How did you know?
Instead, you offer her a smile and a hug. When you lock arms, you’re not sure who is keeping the other from coming undone.
#
I’m wheeled out of the hospital because I can’t walk; an elephant has stepped on my abdomen full force and left a two and a half inch mini-C-section scar in its place. I can’t walk for several days, actually, and the pain is so bad I sob without moving while all my mom can do is hold me and watch.
#
New Girl is still something of a social outcast for the rest of seventh grade, but she has her group of cringey boys to keep her afloat. You don’t mind her company—even if she does play with Beyblades with the boys and pretends to be animals with them during lunch, she’s not mean or gross. Even if she does like girls.
Pretty Girl hurts to look at now, partly because of the disgust you know she’s capable of and partly because looking directly at the sun blinds one’s eyes. You want to be special to her. No, you correct yourself, you want to be her. There is a difference. The want to become is not the same as wanting, and this distinction is important.
From across your desks, Pretty Girl looks at you and water rises in your chest. You push it down.
#
When I’m able to walk again, the C-section scar shows itself as a new sensation sliced into me that I’m not used to. It bristles when I breathe as if it has a life and lungs of its own. All damaged nerves and dissolvable sutures, this is a clear path to my insides. I am afraid of the stitches breaking. I am afraid that one strong cough will split the incision back open and parts of me will spill out and I won’t be able to catch them and everybody will see me exposed with all my guts out on the floor.
#
When eighth grade inevitably comes around, you and Best Friend lean into each other, two rails of a stepladder. She is bitter and abrasive but holds a soft spot for you alone. Best Friend tells you she doesn’t believe in God despite the fact that you both dissect Bible passages every other day in class and you stay silent because you have never known a life without one.
A rumor comes around that a boy likes you—one of the off-putting, cringey boys the other girls treat with begrudging civility—and the muscles in your chest stiffen together. The more you try to pry them apart the tighter they hold. You hope—pray—that he doesn’t pull you aside to confess to you like a sinner, and so you avoid him despite previously never harboring any ill will towards him.
You’re thirteen years old and resolve to become a nun if it means a life free from boys’ eyes. You’ll dedicate yourself to a force you’ve never met if He’ll give you a place to hide.
#
I don’t like it, this scar. I don’t like to touch it because there’s no sensation that registers it’s there. Just puffed-up pink skin and a vague tingle in my spine.
When my room is cold, it prickles, shudders, and I’m forced to feel it. It’s a reminder that the destruction in my body expands beyond just my squashed organs; my outside, too, has been slashed open, and now I have to bear the consequences forever.
It’s ugly, I think to myself. Ugly and damaged. That’s what I must be.
#
You pray a lot more these days. You almost look forward to the biweekly prayer services where the whole school is ushered into the church and made to sing songs everybody already knows by heart. Best Friend never sings, but you always do. You tell yourself that if you sing loud enough, maybe Christ will answer questions you’re too afraid to ask.
You take countless online quizzes in hopes for a different result and learn to clear your search history. For your penance, you cry in your silence. You beg God to rip it out of you, martyr you into something holy that can be forgiven. You want to be a person worth blessing, but truthfully, you don’t know if you’re a person at all.
#
My doctor recommends scar tape. When I put it on, it’s cold and uncomfortable and forces me to remember that the incision is there in the first place. Upon contact, the scar retracts into my body like a snail into its shell and I hate it, being reminded that there is a part of me that’s unsightly and invasive. Touching the toughened skin makes me so uneasy that I stop using the scar tape halfway through the pack because I am afraid I’ll somehow gouge me open again.
So I’m left there, with my unlovely. Do something or don’t, it’s with me all the same.
#
You and Best Friend are in her treehouse again and she’s staring out the window with that faraway look on her face she always seems to have these days. Earlier, she’d been shit-talking Pretty Girl and you, without knowing why, quietly defended her. The conversation, somehow, had then turned to out-of-the-closet celebrities, and because you are middle schoolers in 2013, those are people like Frankie Grande and Tyler Oakley.
“Did you see Troye Sivan came out as gay?” you ask. The word is lumpy and foreign in your mouth.
Best Friend shrugs. “Okay.”
You watch one of his music videos together. Best Friend says it’s good and that is it. The tension in your chest tightens.
#
Damaged goods, I think to myself, my body my only offering. What if nobody wants to look at me like this? What if I suddenly get intimate with someone and they’re sickened by what they see? Will anybody want to touch something so marred?
A week after the operation, I’m staring at my reflection in the mirror again. Picking me apart. The fault line right below my abdomen as something hideous. My stomach has deflated significantly but has now left me with something new to agonize over. Me as something abhorrent.
I’ll just never let anyone get that far with me anymore, I decide at sixteen. Keep this imperfection a secret. Nobody has to know.
#
None of the girls speak to New Girl anymore unless they have to, and she seems to have accepted her fate with the weird boys. Apparently she doesn’t need any of you.
You’re not like her though. You’re not strong or independent. You are a thirteen year old girl who desperately wants to be wanted. You need to feel liked by the other girls even though you don’t know how to Dutch braid or make Rainbow Loom bracelets. The idea of being isolated, starved of the communal acceptance you’ve worked so hard for, carves out your chest and torches the cavity.
You want to be Pretty Girl. You want to be Lip Balm Girl. Or maybe you want to be either one to be close to the other. It doesn’t really matter—you’re condemned either way.
#
“I don’t like the scar,” I admit to my mom one day after I’m able to walk around more comfortably. I still prefer to stay in bed, but at least I’m mobile now.
My mother, beside my bed, laughs. “I have one too, you know,” she says. “I got it after I had your sister, and then you. Now we’re matching!”
“Does it ever go away?”
“No,” she tells me. “But why be ashamed of it?”
#
The treehouse again. You and Best Friend on your colored iPhones watching makeup videos or Bath and Body Works hauls or doing something middle school girls do when they’re together. It doesn’t matter. Her attention is glued to the screen while yours is high up and tangled in the power lines, far away from this treehouse. An itch in your throat.
“I need to tell you something,” you blurt out, loud, shaky. Best Friend looks up from her screen.
“Uh…okay.”
“I think I’m a lesbian.”
A brief pause. The word tastes dirty in your mouth, a tongue full of ash.
“Okay,” she finally says.
“Are you mad?”
Best Friend frowns. “Why would I be mad?”
“I thought you didn’t like [New Girl] because she likes girls.”
She gives you a quizzical look. “I don’t dislike her because she’s gay. I don’t like her ‘cause she’s annoying.”
“So we’re still friends?”
“Well, yeah we’re still friends. Why would I care about that?”
You’re yanked back into your body and it feels right again. Then the two of you are laughing bright and Best Friend changes your contact name in her phone to GBF (“for ‘Gay Best Friend.’ Like the movie,” she says). It’s silly, and the term is mostly applicable to men, but it makes you breathe for the first time in years.
Best Friend keeps her promise and tells no one about your lesbian-ness. You don’t tell her of the hypertension caused by Pretty Girl and she doesn’t ask because some things you’re allowed to keep to yourself. Even after you graduate, even when your lives part ways, she doesn’t say a thing.
#
It takes me a good two weeks to properly recover from my salpingectomy. The scar still tingles at times, and at others it’s still difficult to look at, but I can’t hate it anymore. Not when it’s an echo of someone else.
My stitches dissolve. I wear my two-piece swimsuits to the beach. I wear my tank tops and little denim shorts. It’s not visible—it’s much lower than where the waistline of clothing sits—but I know it’s there, breathing with me, no longer an angry reminder of my hollowing but a soft one of survival. Of life.
Sometimes I still trace the scar with my pinky to remind myself of what my body is capable of. Yes, it tried to kill me from the inside, but it also persisted. Shaped itself into a place meant for me among the warped muscle and blood, through all of the self malevolence. So I must treat it with reverence. A body is sacred, a body is divine, a domicile deserving of care. Wouldn’t it be a disservice to myself to deny me of that?
#
Years later, you face your reflection at home, and it’s bigger now. Growing, because you wanted, needed to know what you would spring into if you just let yourself. So, you let yourself. The world swells. There is nothing left to die over.
You have no prayers to answer and no divine duty to fulfill. Therefore, you are no God.
You are a person. That girls' bathroom is very far away.
Bekah Lazar (they/them), aka "Beaks" to many, is a self-acclaimed professional dog walker and avid scrapbooker from the Bay Area, California. You can find their upcoming work in The Lupa Newsletter, EcoTheo Review, and A Brand New Word in the End Drops Out, an anthology under West Trade Review.
