27 by Noa Youngblood

Tell me how

how it feels, realizing you started starving yourself when you came out.

to know your revenge on the world is to exist

But also less in it

Twenty-seven days before you leave the country, you meet a girl in Spain. You can’t speak a word of her language (the one you’ve been studying for three years and counting) because you don’t want to seem tan tonta, but you are for not speaking. You are for not jumping.

She comes with friends you already know and adore. One of them, the one with dark lips, told me we looked alike.

She is tall and takes up space, sits with her knees wide apart.

She moves with her mouth and her eyes and her hands when they puncture the air are theatre, art aggressive.

It is frigid when you meet, tucked into the corner of northern Spain. You are from the sunshine. Sunshine and the rainy seasons in August. Man-made lakes and the flatlands, running on a hurt foot in the suburbs. You miss it and are far from it.

When you first saw the girl you knew she was like you. Not because you looked alike, really, but because you don’t. Because she takes up space with ease and you lounge around, jut out your chin and pretend to.

Because the mirrors in your room face walls, and because this might be the only girl that looks like you that wants to look at you.

Our eyes met and we kissed. Both cheeks. I smiled with no teeth so I knew she knew I knew, but I didn’t know if she knew.

Wait what?

Could you tell me?

Why you love women, love their bodies

And how they are in their bodies

With their bodies and with you

Say it, say it

then tell me where to start

In the first café, she says she’s got the hots for a girl on her team, but a girl que ya tiene novia. She leans across the table when she says this, leaning on one arm, arching closer towards you.

Apparently, this chick cheats on her girlfriend with this girl I’ve just met and already I can see that that’s over.

Because now I’m here with twenty-seven days to burn and, cariña, I’m good with the heat. You’re smirking at her, tilting up your chin up to meet her eyes and that’s never happened before, sparking up as she brags, saying her name would have been Diego.

The cuffs of her sleeves are rolled up and her t-shirt pulls across her chest. Her thighs fill her jeans and I can’t look away.

Her family doesn’t know and she asks me how could they not. Tells me she’s a late bloomer but still a gold star so hey.

¿Are you, am I what?

A dyke

You love it and mean it

claimed it and still angry

consume(d)

The first time I had sex I was eighteen in the town I’d lived in since I was ten. That next morning I braided her hair. It was thin and everything about her slipped through my fingers.

My first-time girl told me the first time she saw me I was eating almonds in a dress, meeting up with her roommate to go to Spanish class. I was munching and said what’s up so from then on my first-time girl made sure she was awake and aloof every Monday, Thursday, and Friday at eight fifty-five a.m.

The very next morning, months later, I asked her if that was sex.

“Uhh, I’d say that I fucked you,”

Goddamn but now I don’t wear dresses and all my hair is gone. Gone, except for just enough to grab onto with short nails.

She liked you and me better skinny. She never said it but I knew. She hardly ate and I saw it in her eyes, knew when I was braiding her hair. When she reached up my dress her hips were sharp and it hurt me, the first time and everytime after it hurt me.

After we broke up I threw up in the shower til people congratulated me on wasting away.

Hate your own

Punish your own

not know what to do

With your own

On your own

Tell me

I went over there one more time before Christmas, went over to the first-time girl. Almost two year later and fucked her so good she shook. I was all the way inside her and pressed myself down against her. All of me, with hardly any of me left at all.

We started fighting right after, me and her, while I was still jealous of her body that I always loved and she was too high, Black Sabbath playing too loud so she told me where the door was with smoke leaving her mouth, thinking I’d never leave so I did, at 4 am and still with long hair.

She dropped out from school later that semester but I didn’t know for weeks because I ignored all her calls and still do, not remembering why I bothered or what I even looked like or why I was on top of her. Where her eyes were when her hips hurt me.

I loved her when I left but was laughing too, relieved to be grieving, finally. I started loving her the second I stopped kissing her, right before Christmas in her dorm that smelled like my sex, finally.

Then it was January. A guy she has been sleeping with comes up to me drunk at a party. I am drunk for the first time in ages and feel amazing, hating what he says, how he knew it, wolfing down every word. He said the first-time girl still wanted me. Wouldn’t shut up about me, dreams about me, now I was in a shape that she liked and how she couldn’t believe it, finally.

Tells me he can see it in my face.

How much better I look. How beautiful I am. He wants to kiss me so I am disgusted and smug and still starving, knowing then the first-time girl and I were not lovers but twins. Children like bastards, from the sun and fucked up suburbs. Smiling women with lots of teeth, white and in a perfect line, arch of calf just so — no value til we do womanhood like we’re sorry about it and in so little space so we diet, girl hate while we take pills that make us shit too much and floss twice a day. Then swearing we’re exempt because lesbians aren’t women, not really, and aren’t I too queer, too smart, for this? But still not really, no.

to love a woman

her body

which on yourself is shame

dis-eased

make love to anybody

without making peace

to ourselves

But this tall girl now. This girl in Spain that I’ve just met and inhabits without apology, she is so huge to me. Who nods her head when I say stars are subjective and smiles, laughs when I say I’ve fucked one guy that I’ve never had sex with, just about a month ago and he wasn’t even Spanish.

Who tells me I look twenty-five and likes how I tug at my hair. Tells me her first-time girl was two months ago with that chick that’s got a girlfriend so we both laugh jaja but know it’s not funny when she asks me how I came out because this is still relevant.

Tell me how it feels

to remember your first binge

which is the memory of every binge

to be sick and wondering

for it all to be enough

waiting

The first piece I ever wrote was about a man that was dying.

He was me and the girl was her. The first-time girl, gave her a different name, made her a character so she stopped being real but not irrelevant.

I do not show my next girlfriend, call it purge.

Then using it all to get into that creative writing seminar, which felt pretty bien at the time. Until I get there, get called out about bury-your-gay cliches by straights and sometimes I feel dead.

My next girlfriend tells me to lighten up.

Tells me I’m lucky she’s got such a thing for white girls but my inflection needs work. We fuck in the mornings and she shows me Miami. Calls me belleza at night with an accent that’s airy and we smile.

Tells me to get in the backseat when we pick up her friends.

Who says I have chicken legs and why don’t I eat this or that and should we order take-out why can’t I make up my mind for God’s sake I have no back bone snap snap.

Who says the only thing Argentinian people love more than futbol is themselves and I believed her without question. Tells me she will write to me in Spain, will come visit me, share my bed again. Who does not look me in the eyes ever and tells me te quiero instead.

One night I get a nosebleed, streak red all over her thighs, sticky all over her neck and she’s cool about it.

We stop speaking even before I leave.

purge

write it all over my body

baby

how could they not know

we ask each other

still

Forts made from bed sheets and brownie pans, volcanoes of flour and swollen yokes breaking lava. My hands would be sticky and warm with chocolate and staring up towards blanket shadows. Little at my aunt’s house.

The best part was the stories, always from the same book and always open like a mouth. All these years later and I still remember the pictures. Sodom, the most vivid still, and I want to know more though I do not understand it. The city raised, ruined by fire from dark skies for sin and to me as a child this is romance.

Lot and his daughters fleeing God, not looking back because God was looking down.

All I can remember now is the woman they left behind. Stiff with salt and daring. A white pillar which maybe if you squint becomes me and I am her with half-closed eyes, just there but it is smoky and so hard to tell. I ask but my favorite aunt does not remember the stories now. She helps me book my flight home and we only sometimes skype. She tells me I look healthy and happy and have I met anyone?

tell me how

and it makes sense

that I feel out and still a secret,

militant and confused

unable to bare

coming out

(again)

about how I feel

about a woman’s body

(mine)

And this new, tall girl that I am here with now, who wants to walk me home and knows none of this because it somehow does not really matter. I want her. Her, who is so large to me.

I kiss her in the street.

I kiss her light and then hard and she tells me not to bite her because she does not like that at all, please stop.

Shit, I say. Then try and again and it goes way better, thank God.

She wishes that I was not leaving quite so soon pero es lo que hay. It is what it is and it’s now that I realize I want to look like her.

That I want her to look at me, or maybe even look back. Look back at white pillars that are us and aren’t, who is so tall I must look up and could never miss me, back turned. Even with smoke and eyes half closed.

She kisses with her eyes open and I am sure now that she sees me. Sees a girl that looks like her and wants to, finally

with twenty-seven days left

Noa lives in Florida. She is pursuing a Bachelors in Spanish language and literature, in addition to a concentration in Gender Studies. She identifies as feminist, lesbian-on-the-continuum and a sometimes queer-on-the-run. She has been published in Scythe Literary Journal and Impossible Archetype.