here is how it will happen.

You will receive health insurance for the first time in eight years minus one summer.

A human dressed in a different version of queer than you will ask: “So, how’s your gender going these days.”

And you will smile because there is something so rewarding about breathing sometimes and you will inhale so deeply, you can taste your organs.

“Everything is still forming its bones,” you answer. “There are some things that are getting louder and some things that are feeling stronger in me.”

When you mention hysterectomy, you do not announce the time your professor at the university near the mountains thought you already had one due to the way you were writing about your blood and carved out structure.

You want to cry the moment your lover tells you, “I imagine you wearing the chest you dream about, not the one that greets me each night.”

You hoard that free coffee, owed to you on punch card from favorite cafe, housed in your wallet. You want to save it for a time that celebrates something you’ve been longing for.

You will revisit a lover who loved you when you were still searching for the instruments to carve out the vocabulary of your thoughts. It will be like time never passed and you will relocate that smile you had before that time you used to pretend away. You will kiss a map of all the years onto the palm of the others’ hand.

“But do you even want to figure all this out?” says the one dressed in warm and sleep-deprived.

“This? Is it something to figure out or untwist like knots of curious yarn,” you answer.

You’ve got too many turns in you, so you say: “I’m just looking to feel alive from all my angles. I want to play seek, rather than hide so much.”

Here is how it will happen.

You will stop locking yourself away like a diary with blank pages. You deserve to be read.

You will kiss and you will opposite-of-rhyme and you will read enough books to feed your eyes. And you will whistle even in the winter when your lips shiver. And you will wake. And you will wake. And you will stay.