joão

“It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn’t know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl—
and here, I’d like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn’t mean
to compare myself to faces I can’t have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo’s angels, from the marble—
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else.”
― Ashe Vernon, Wrong Side of a Fistfight