mechanical pencils & paper hearts

Today I read about female albatrosses,
that thirty-one percent of them pair off with other females for life.
Did their mothers cry for them when they found love in another girl
like ours did?
In their world it is natural. It’s okay.
In ours, your mother screamed in two languages.
In ours, mine wouldn’t accept it.
In ours, your mother carved out craters in your face.
In ours, my mother’s organs shivered under the weight of all the ice in her ribcage.

Love never distorted into ugly until people told me it was.
Kissing you never felt shameful until people told me it was.
I wish that we had never experienced the ugliness,
I wish that we could’ve accepted ourselves from the beginning.

The guilt of something that never existed
weighed on us until we were breathless and broken,
and we gave up.
I wish we never did.
I wish we could’ve loved each other in front of the entire world
and when they said something,
we would’ve laughed and loved harder.

If we had been born as albatrosses we never would’ve questioned it.
I wish we never had to.