Metamorphosis

by Arantxa Villa

Metamorphosis

by an anonymous fourth year 

I am eleven years old, and I am growing as tall and skinny as a bean sprout. Everything in my life is changing, including myself. It’s subtle. The girls in my class have stopped playing pretend at recess. Now they cluster on the asphalt, whispering about crushes. When I’m at my yearly check-up, the doctor tells my mom to expect my first period in the next year or so, and I wrinkle my nose at the thought of blood. 

We always divided up, to some degree—boys on one side, girls on the other—but the gulf between us has never seemed so wide as it does this year. I suppose this should make me unhappy, since I understand I will never quite belong on either side. 

It doesn’t. 

Instead it’s my own little secret, bright and vibrant as a flower. I have something special, something enviable. It’s all the better not to share it, to keep it held tightly to my chest. The world is vast, beautiful, and strange. Tadpoles grow legs and turn into frogs, caterpillars build cocoons and emerge with wings in a thousand-thousand colors, I can feel like a boy and a girl at the same time. I do not know the word nonbinary or a single person like me. 

It does not make me feel wrong, feel lesser, in the slightest. 

Of course, time passes, and the world seeps in. I am thirteen, and I am layering shirts and hoodies to flatten my chest. I am fifteen, and I am watching as a boy in my class comes out as transgender, only to be bullied back into the closet. I am eighteen, and I am trying to convince myself that if I look and act the right way, the thing that lives inside my skin will settle into only being a girl, and I will finally be normal. 

And then I am twenty, and I am realizing that I can either live and die with broken, malformed wings, or I can allow myself to grow into the person I was meant to be. 

I change my pronouns. It scares me. I want to love it, but every time I hear my friend say “they” instead of “she”, I’m glancing around to see who heard. My mind has created a backlog of every cruel and bigoted thing I have heard directed towards someone like me, and it plays on a loop every time I take a step forward. I keep taking those steps anyways. 

I am twenty-two, and I am still growing, just not in the same way I was at age eleven. I wear pronoun pins in public and correct people when they get them wrong. I buy a chest binder and research going on testosterone. The secret that once grew solitary in my chest is now pressing blossoms between the gaps in my rib cage for all the world to see. 

I think I like it better that way.