The skeleton before the evening breeze

I look at my face in the mirror and want to see my skeleton instead of me. There’s a life deep beneath this skin. A makeup I have grown to hate over time for no shortage of discrepant self-esteem. But maybe there are more reasons for soul-gashing. Hate abounds in my heart for what I see because it is a gravestone of a person who should be. Someone with beauty, inexplicable beauty, and a mind racing at a thousand kilometers per hour but utters words with the cadence of a butterfly coasting through open space - every word calculated and chosen with care, with Shakespearean eloquence. Poetic rhyming. A conceptive mind. A person not ruled by the archaic binarity established long before their existence.

So when I look like - am - a skeleton, what next? I’d be too happy to worry about what “next” is. I would not have to worry about presenting appropriately, buried within layers and layers of pseudo-selves. I would not have to worry about whether my voice was deep or high enough. I would not have to worry about what I am or how I should present to people. I would not need to feel the ache of misperception. I would not need to wince when they called me what I’m not. No, all I’d have to worry about is existing, which is all I really want. I really want to not worry about these things. My skeleton would be able to do that. Just be. A fraction of me. A tragedy of self, to which extent I cannot determine, is posed by the “beability” of skeletons. There’d be nothing to hold them together. I’d need cartilage, too, and muscles, maybe. But muscles pose problems. They’re far too divulging. So I don’t want muscles. The skeleton, therefore, faces the cost of sacrifice. What does that leave me with? What, then, is truly next? Perhaps nothingness would suffice - a still, soundless, breathless, doubtless nothingness. I would coast about without worrying about how people perceive me. What roles they think I must have. They would not be able to box me in and shove skin on me, and clothes, and facial hair, and a life that is barely mine. They would feel me pass by and think, what a lovely evening breeze.