Bald to bald
Picture this.
I am holding my bruised self together with coffee and painkillers,
the day has already made me feel defeated,
and I see you on Grafton street, I smile and then cry.
A bald head like mine in the crowd! Matching looks never spoke so loudly to me…
We smile because I see myself in you, and you see yourself in me, and no words are necessary.
To others we are zeroes, unfathomable tragedy, defective or drab.
To each other we are a smile that feels like triumph.
We are not people with a missing part, our heads can be people’s punching bags,
all their body issues congregate and isolate difference that is not exceptional.
Showing it off is exceptional, only because hiding has been singled out as the only option.
They are all punching themselves anyway, the ones who comment on our visible scalps,
and we are just collateral damage,
especially on dark days when we ask people who hate themselves to give us love
when they have run out of it or discarded it, deeming themselves unworthy.
To others we are zeroes, unfathomable tragedy, defective or drab.
To each other we are a smile that feels like triumph.
Triumph for all the boxes we have escaped to stand here,
unapologetically defective, awesomely ugly.
Ugly as in “breaking the rules”. Defective as in “non-compliant”.
Triumph after almost sacrificing it all for whatever pretty hill we were to die on.
We made it out tired, bruised and alive. We gave up so much praise and acceptance.
We escaped a conveyor belt to add an option, question rules,
and decide what the heck to do with our bodies.
We smile because I see myself in you, and you see yourself in me, and no words are necessary.
I smile because I have tried all the ways I could to disappear, trying to conform just to be safe from judgement, always alone on my travels.
I smile ‘cause there is no real safety in disappearing, the risk of drowning in shame is just so high,
and I am glad to see you found the same shore I did, and didn’t drown.
To the people who make pitiful comments a smile is all we have left to appeal to others.
Let me reassure you, that pitiful eye has got nothing on me. When I receive compliments for my body and hit “return to sender” I hit the nerve of beauty as a must with vigor, and queer intensity.
I only answer to the person who now smiles at me in the mirror. And no one else.
The person in yours, I am sure, guides your travels today in this rigid yet ever-changing world.
To each other we are tears, because I don’t know what you did after, but I cried.
I cried. I cried because someone fucking saw me today.
Saw me and understood. No words needed.
I love words, but I’d rather know at a glance you get me.
We are the zeroes that can’t be erased. After surviving so many shame catastrophes, we are shores for others, and each other, for a moment of rest during the current shame storms.
We are the tears we need to cry and the smiles we need to acknowledge.
A nod to say: “I see you.”
Dare to be b@ld 