reading room
Pendulum
At thirteen, I thought desire meant doing. That love had to move forward, that progress meant skin, not understanding.
I learned to measure myself by how much someone else wanted to touch me, and I mistook that for meaning.
Each girl became a mirror tilted at a different angle, and I kept asking my reflection to look more like a man.
Somewhere in these years a flower grew in me— soft, uncertain, too bright. I kept trimming it back, afraid it made me less.
I chased comfort like a currency, collected validation like breath, and built entire futures on the phrase I love you, because it made me real.
When they turned away, the silence felt like proof that I wasn't enough that warmth was something only given, never grown.
Then someone came along whose mind lit up like mine: quick, curious, kind, but her eyes searched for a man I could only perform, never become. Her wanting bruised me softly. I admired her brilliance, but not her hunger for the shape she thought I was.
Later, there was someone beautiful, beautiful like the clarity, beautiful like the first thing you notice and the last thing you understand. But we kept breaking, reassembling in slightly wrong shapes, calling it love, calling it trying.
I stopped needing her to hold me to prove I existed. Stopped needing to be the boy she could fix, or tear, or forgive. I simply stopped, and that was its own freedom.
Now, I find myself drawn to softness unclaimed by roles, to people who don't gender their gentleness, who find beauty in divergence and speak in frequencies I don't have to translate.
That old flower still grows— once soft and shameful, now honest and unlabelled. It leans toward its own light, petals shifting, undefined, become whatever warmth allows.
The pendulum slows. I'm still learning what movement means when it isn't toward someone. I don't know what I'll seek next— whose laughter will stay, whose eyes I'll meet without pretending first.
But the world feels wider now, like a garden waking in me, and I've only just begun to name the petals.
— Lilith