malalai khan

my body turned 20 in october and i started gymming a week after as if sculpting the vessel might make it listen to me. i have always found it lovely that my birthday was in the same month as halloween. the only day everyone welcomes transformation, transfiguration, metamorphosis. it feels right—my favourite holiday. maybe because of the horror and nostalgia. maybe because monsters are mirrors of the worst parts of us. or the truest. maybe because a costume lets you slip into another life for a night. or step more fully into the one you’ve never dared to claim without anyone’s needling gaze. 

my body turned 20 and i don’t know how to feel, having fallen out of the teen-age bracket. the country of half-light and becoming. an eclipse, an autumn, a sunset. the tally marks now gather in four neatly-cut bundles of five. if i could give a year off my life to any creature i meet, perhaps everything would feel more purposeful, more tethered.

my body turned 20 and still it will not open to me. i reach inside it, searching for a place that fits, and my hands meet the blankness where a self should settle. time will carve its mark—changes meant for a person i have never been—and it will not be mine. 

my body turned 20 and it disgusts me at what it wants and thinks and feels and needs. even if it does change, its pulse would be the same and whatever has touched it would remain in memory like a curse. 

my body turned 20 in october and i keep waiting for the day it turns into me.

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