Draft after draft until honesty emerges is really just me, hunched over my laptop, squinting at a sentence and wondering if it’s telling the truth or just being polite. Sometimes I can feel when a line is faking it—like it’s trying to pass at a party where it doesn’t know anyone. I’ll read it back and think, okay, but who are you really.
The other night I wrote something about the way sunlight hit my kitchen table, and out tumbled this line: “The light tries on my skin like a borrowed shirt.” I stopped, blinked, and sort of laughed. It didn’t sound like something I’d planned. It sounded a little bit like me, but also like someone I might want to be—softer, braver about being seen. It’s funny how sometimes my queerness slips into the poem like that, not as a declaration, but as a softness, a willingness to be touched by the world and to say so.
The thing is, I can tell when I’m writing around myself instead of from myself. That’s when the drafts pile up, each one a little closer to my real voice. My body knows before my head does; I’ll get this little flutter in my chest, a low warmth, when a line finally lands where it needs to. It’s not dramatic. It’s just real. And honestly, that’s my favorite part—the tiny shift from pretending to being present.
So I keep going. Draft after draft, I circle back to the truth, or at least to something that feels like it wants to be true. And when I get there, even for a moment, it feels a lot like coming home to myself—queer, Black, soft, and stubbornly hopeful.