There’s a moment in writing where my own words catch me off guard. It’s never the line I planned. Sometimes I’m just sitting at my kitchen table, coffee cooling, half-distracted by a song looping quietly, and suddenly a phrase lands on the page that feels truer than I meant to be. It’s like my hands knew something before my head did.
The other night, I was half-heartedly trying to wrangle a poem into shape, not even sure I liked where it was headed. Then this line just popped out, plain and soft: I want to be gentle with myself, even when the world isn’t. I didn’t mean for it to sound so raw. I was aiming for clever, honestly. But there it was, right in the middle of all my crossed-out mess, looking at me like it had always belonged.
It’s funny how my queerness floats up in my writing without me trying. Sometimes I think I’m hiding it, but then a line like that appears and I realize I’m not hiding much at all. Maybe that’s the point. My softness sneaks in, too—Black boy tenderness, the kind that’s easy to overlook in the world but impossible to ignore on the page. Sometimes I laugh at myself for being so earnest, then I remember I like it that way.
There’s no magic here. Just me, trying to keep up with the parts of myself that show up when I’m not looking. The words don’t always fit, but when they do, it’s a quiet kind of surprise. I let the line stay, even though it embarrassed me a little. I guess I trust the page to hold what I can’t always say out loud. And that feels like enough for tonight.