She is a Girl

I wish I had brought more feminine clothes home with me. Something that would immediately identify me as a girl. Instead I brought a plethora of androgynous sweaters and t-shirts. I feel bad for my mother who has to accept that I am not the little girl she thought I would be. I feel worse because I seem to continuously throw it in her face. When small children mistake me for a boy I can feel the discomfort come over both her and I. She defends what is left of the female child she knows she birthed. She insists that I am a girl even though she knows I don't look like one. I hope that she is unconsciously begging them to understand there is more than one way to be a girl, and not everyone with short hair and a sweater is a boy. That even though my chest is bound tightly under two sports bras you can still kind of see that I have breasts. But unfortunately, I think she is trying to convincing herself "this is Melissa, she is a girl." 

Morbidity in the Dead of Winter

As I drove past the cemetery that my grandmother is buried in my stomach sank. I try to, at all costs, avoid the thought of her body. I try to remember her round, rosy cheeked and laughing, like I see her in the photographs from my youth. I try not to think about the frail woman who prematurely aged and then left. She is buried in a plot at the back of the cemetery. I thought of how my grandfather, who used to visit her grave regularly, daily, has now permanently relocated to Florida. Far far away from his beloved. And then I thought about how sad and morbid it is to leave our loved ones rotting in the ground. To wither away and turn into dust - alone. I unfortunately pictured what her frail broken body looked like when she died. So tiny and old. Destroyed. Ripped apart by both illness and treatment. And I think about what it means to die and to be left in a distant grave that no one wants to visit anymore. As if it is payback for leaving the living to mourn in the first place.