i caress my skin foreign to me my body I am a stranger within my breasts, my hips don't fit into the image, a dizzying mental scrimmage, that i even as a child was battling in my mind vehemently i wanted to be wearing only blue by age three, but i was told 'hush, you'll be what we want you to be' and my desires were thrown away with the lock, and the key somewhere I could no longer see I had a phase where I would cake myself in arrays of makeup, and like a play assume the role of straight, telling myself, rehearsing what to say the way to wear ribbons, and braids in my hair, and put on heels that made me feel like i was going to suffocate. i felt like my fate of unhappiness would haunt me forevermore and it wouldn't cease to go away, i didn't know one day, looking for something unrelated, that it had a name.