I have this rule, that I did not write, yet it is one that my body still gives itself no choice but to follow.

This rule is written, no, carved, etched into the back of my skull, a rule I cannot read.

This rule is one that makes me ask questions along the lines of if I’m just pedantic,
or if it’s an issue of semantics
that’s keeping me from having
what I see comes so naturally to everyone else.

Never liked it, never will, and trust me I’ve tried.

But how can I say that without feeling like I’ve lied?

I keep asking these questions until the inflections make no more sense coming out of my mouth.

And then I get angry.

Angry at myself because the only logical conclusion that I come to is that I am selfish.

Angry at the tension I have felt from so many over my life and the sense that I am the only one who wants it cut out, removed.

Angry at the rules that have existed from the start of time itself, that keep being re-written and re-worded but never truly change, the rules that are everywhere I look and feel, yet their dominance somehow cannot move me.

To sit in a room between many rooms surrounded by love poems and sonnets and a yearning for that connection, it is so beautiful, but oh so alien.

In a place where the other is normalized to the point of understanding, who is to expect the understanding of an absence?

In what world is one expected to consider the inaction of an action-focused status quo?

I know that this isn’t that world. Which is why I implore you to look.

Look, and you will surely find that this queer narrative’s happy ending is not one centred around a union of souls but of a solitary one, who simply wants to be.

Look, please look, and you will find me.

And by all means, if you are free, feel free to come over to me, hold me, kiss me, I am eager to please, but I am painfully aware that I am unaware of where that leaves me.

For I am still human and desire to be, be in a state of intimacy, but no, not like that.

And I still crave that privilege, to be considered an important character in someone else’s story, but no, not like that.

And I still want to feel the pressure, the weight, of another body splayed atop my own while it rains outside, pinning me to the bedsheets and the earth, but, no, not like that.

I find it ironic that the rules of the world I object to are ones that I can read, with the clarity of 22 years of observation, forming an almost clinical understanding, as if viewing a specimen from afar.

We all feel, of that I am sure. but I tell you this with confidence: I cannot feel you in the ways I am expected to, we are not the same.

“Alone together” is my forever unachievable, we are all worlds apart and it’s going to take me an impossible amount of time to reach you.

And that same rule etched into the back of my skull tells me it isn’t worth it to try.

But what good are rules if you can’t bend them a little bit?

Because the truth is, I am so full of love,

It has just managed to seep into the cracks in the pavement: fractured and seemingly shallow, but spread so, so wide.

And though it is seen as foreign it burns with as much vigour as I am able to give, and I have learned that I can give so much.

And if you would be so kind, given time, I’m sure I could teach you what that means.

A second flame, akin to the familiar, but blatantly adjacent.

The alternate.

The alterous.

I have this rule etched into the back of my skull.

Do you think you could read it for me?