The Inside
 

What makes a boy a boy or a girl a girl?
Is it what’s between their legs?
What’s on their chest or lack thereof?
The clothes they wear?
What happened to, “it’s on the inside that counts?”

I bind my chest
I wear baggy clothes
I try to act the role of what I am on the inside
Still, society sees me as ‘Noe’

Who is Noe?
Noe is the little girl who died when I was 12
Noe is the girl who’s body I own
Noe is the random jumble of syllables and letters that doesn’t fit
The person on the inside

So who is on the inside?
On the inside is Logan
Logan is the boy who was born when Noe died
Logan is the boy stuck in a girl’s body
Logan is the boy who suffers trying to make society see him
Logan is the boy who’s always cast in the shadows of
The girl’s body he’s forced to own

Some days Noe comes back out
Some days Noe is shown to the world again
Those days when the body is put in dresses and skirts
That’s when Noe comes back
And she gets told, “You make such a nice girl!”
“You look beautiful!”

You know what Logan wants to hear most?
He wants to hear that this doesn’t look right
That the dress his body is forced in doesn’t fit his place
That he looks ugly, terrible even
And he should go back to Logan, and let Noe stay dead

Scars line his wrist
Her wrist
He scars her body because he feels it isn’t his
He was forced into this body at birth to suffer
And the scars let the suffering be known
And yet he is questioned,
“What happened there?”
He lies those familiar lies he’s already thought of and rehearsed in his mind
“I fell,”
“I scraped it against something,”
“I got hit with a tree branch,”
Anything to satisfy their questioning

This girl
This boy
This person is forced in this body, suffering everyday
Trying to make it another four more years
He is only a freshman in high school
He’s always told this will go away, that it’s just a phase
He’s been in this “phase” for 3 years
It isn’t a phase
It won’t go away
He barely survives for his friends
The people who truly know who he is and accepts him for who he is
Those are the people he lives for
And all the others hate and rejection can’t measure up
For if they did, Logan would be dead