Sometimes.
i. Sometimes I am jealous. I will never not be jealous. My insecurity is not in my body or in my mind, but that some combination of everything that makes up me will not be good enough.
ii. Sometimes the standard is the boy whom I kiss and let kiss me and touch and let touch me and whom I trust more than anything but still cannot speak candidly with. For a girl whose currency is words, whose oxygen drips with inky undertones, he makes my words fall short, and it terrifies me.
There are times when I feel commodified. When I say no, and he obliges without protest, but still his fingers creep back without his mind’s consent, and I can feel the disappointment in the pressure of his tongue on mine. He tells me I’m beautiful, and I feel as if he thinks it would not be the case unless he declared it to be so. My body may be lovely, but he will never appreciate the feeling of safety I get from simply being curled up in his arms, wrapped up in him like a security blanket shielding me from the world.
There are other girls he talks about. Friends and nothing more. I never suspect anything undue passes between him and another; I know him better than that. Yet I still get an uneasy feeling in my stomach when he mentions being alone in his car with her. Sitting in my place. Vaguely resembling me, just a shade too similar for comfort.
Being in love or whatever this is is difficult.
iii. Sometimes the standard is myself.
I spend my mornings and evenings and late afternoons and midnights and sunrises and every hour in between in two places at once. I am living, but I am also thinking. I am remembering, and sometimes that is a good thing.
There are happy moments. Many of them. Ones I long to return to. But disillusionment has taught me not to reach for the impossible, only to watch as it slips and slices through the delicate skin of my fingers.
Then there are the regrets and the sorrows and the shame. Sometimes I find myself thinking through motives and thoughts and actions of the near and distant past. I find myself picking out everything that would drive me away if I were you. I could list those things off up until this very moment in time, but every second spent writing would add another seventeen items to the infinite pages.
iv. Sometimes the standard is everyone else.
How we cannot kiss or touch too much in daylight for fear of being noticed, as if the worst thing in the universe would be to draw attention to something as beautiful as our love.
How boys on the street, aged twelve to seventy-three, ogle and there is nothing I can do, short of packaging my body in an opaque refrigerator box like the object I am, to keep their pawing eyes at bay.
How I am part of something bigger than myself, whether or not I signed up for it at the activities fair directly preceding my birth into this world.
How expectations and pressures weigh so heavily on my soul that my feet sink a little deeper into where I stand, yet still my stature grows a little shorter at the end of every day.
v. Sometimes the standard is overwhelming.
vi. Sometimes I am insufficient.
vii. Sometimes I am enough.
