Soft Oddity

I know me. I know my textures.

I’ve questioned them long enough.

There’s integument housing my spirit, larger than a body.

But into the arena with others, I’m neither within nor without.

There’s shared experience, I haven’t been initiated;

So I find myself pressing sweaty palms and round nose against the zeitgeist to get a better view.

I never understood this hunger for congruency.

The perfect positioning of my features

paired with the right phrase from popular culture.

I learned to twerk,

Am I received?

Do I get a pass into worthy?

The scraping of my flesh to make it fit pretty.

Am I enough?

Do I get to be held in a heart for real?

The answer has been no time and again

so I push deeper into my core,

Away from the regret of poorly placed trust and the shame of self deceit.

Just when I can’t mine further into my own source material

for an answer that grants me favor with the general divine,

A light turns on.

“It’s called autism. You should really think about getting a diagnosis.”

Rude.

But I suspected.

Is it conceited to wonder that there are others like me?

Women who couldn’t intuit how to hold their ass

to gain the proper male gander,

who honestly didn’t want to try,

but hurt themselves anyway.

Isolated so long, am I even worthy

to be included with the fervently bruised?

Kinder Youtube faces rattle off list after list of revelation as to why

My particular funny never landed quite right

I couldn’t bear the texture of a kiss or the sound of an ambulance

Or the loss of a friend who didn’t have the heart to tell me

she didn’t understand my motions.

Briefly, I hold an air punch fist of victorious knowing

Followed by the spurning swat of my abuser:

“Shrink. How Dare you claim community and validation

for the Failures of your past!”

A Diagnosis fuels final motive

to turn away from blistering reject

because

Despite what you say,

the sky brightens on the dawning of what’s been up with me all along.

Each day accepts the fullness of this new me.

But at nightfall, the horizon empties of stars

and fills with the memory of painful confusion I’ve let fall away to time.

Decades of answered questions

carries a wasp’s sting

because acceptance is still my motivation.

I was born to interpret the masks of others.

At first I thought I was to mimic,

but presently I understand

My purpose is to breach Mask and liberate the Authenticity of Now.

To find map to Original Play that the ancients left for the cultivation of Sound.

To touch Wind flow wrapping around trees into the hearts of others.

And embrace the channel of energy twisting Stim happy fingers to signal wild birds come play in my hair.

I am one who remembers that Profit comes from unruly self mastery

and the timbre of vulnerable cries to the moon.

From now,

I clumsily pursue merger with others

who understand the sacred purpose of soft oddity

and the succulent opening of our senses.

The crafters of an ethos suited to this earned right to Freedom.