I have always been home to an intricately crafted desire to be admired.

Not an admiration that makes people jealous but

An admiration that allows them to respect, know, and understand who I am.

All of who I am.

Every ounce of who I am until they drown in who I am.

 

I want them to know that I was born into poverty but

I feel like royalty and I am the seed of sheer brilliance.

When people look at me, I want them to see a nebula emanating from catastrophe,

Shining and exploding with light and color right before their awestruck eyes because

That’s what it feels like living on the inside.

 

I want them to know that my father died when I was 16 and

Came back to life at the exact same time with an intensity that

Lives on through his art but in my heart;

A heart of galaxies and celestial figures

Forged from the dust of those I have loved and set adrift.

 

I want them to know that I have fallen in love with ugly and

I have loved ugly so passionately that I could not set ugly apart.

I want them to know that ugly cheats and when ugly cheated on me, it all became so dark.

Ugly makes things dirty with its slimy kisses and its sticky hands.

And before I reached my cosmic form, I was filled with slime and stuck in war.

 

I want them to know the kind of equality I dream of.

Equality that is so deep, raw, and robust

That it salvages all the scars of my impoverished childhood,

Of my grandmother’s teenage flesh,

Of my mother’s dreams,

Of my father’s fleeing,

Of my impulse to hide who I love because two women cannot make a baby.

 

I dream of an equality so profound that it cannot exist or it would wipe out all that ever has.

I want them to know that this is perhaps the saddest realization of my entire life

Yet simultaneously, the most inspiring.

I want them to know.

I need them to know all of this and more.

 

Not for them,

Because a long time ago I vowed my life would not be about anyone else,

But for the implementation of equality through artistic expression-

So that I can avenge my experiences and my pain through my writing-

For me.

 

You see, the scientists are wrong.

A nebula cannot hold all of this in, it does not collapse or flatten or implode.

It explodes.

And I’ve already begun to.

I know absolutely nothing of collapse.