reading room
A Note Outside the Scale
I am not a man, not a woman. The answer is not missing; people just look too long and call it a question.
Mostly, I am just standing there while someone else has a crisis of language.
My hair is clean, blonde, down. I like it that way. That should be the whole story, but it never is.
My voice is not always the same. Neither am I, really.
Some people hear that and act like they’ve caught me.
In straight rooms, I become weirdly aware of where my hands are.
The room starts measuring itself. A glance lingers. A laugh lands strangely. Someone decides they know what I mean.
Boys learn to count. Girls learn to be counted.
untouched, but wanted; chosen, but not too chosen.
I hate the maths of it. I hate how quickly a person gets turned into a result.
But with lesbians, I breathe.
Not because anyone is perfect. Not because nobody ever gets it wrong. Just because fewer corrections gather in the air.
No one seems to wait for one part of me to disprove another.
My body stops becoming a public argument about what I must be, who I must want, or how successfully I have performed desire.
Maybe they know what it is to be explained badly by people who never asked.
Maybe that is why the room feels less locked.
With lesbians, I am treated better. That sounds too simple, but it is true.
Desire feels less like a test there. Less like someone checking whether I fit the story they were sold.
And I get to be there:
voice wavering, hair still damp sometimes, hands with nothing to prove, mind full of questions, body learning, slowly, not to apologise.
And in that space, I am not unfinished. Not miscast. Not half.
I am just the note that sounds wrong until the song moves around it.
— Lilith