The Queerest [🗸]

dahlias 'n gender roles

All eyes are on me.

It's a familiar feeling. The type of feeling that wraps around you and draws every last breath inside your lungs until there's nothing else. The type of feeling that makes it really goddamn hard for your lungs to function. The type of feeling that curls onto your face in a faint red.

An uncomfortable feeling.

My shirt is floral, just because I love pretty shit more than life itself. 

Eyes are still on me.

I shake my head, trying to shake their glances away. I shouldn't care, but fuck do the eyes burn.

My pants are flowy, wide. They move with me, so fucking freeing and bright and Blue.

One of my hands rise to my hair, running through loose waves, tracing over a dahlia that Liyah placed there early this morning. As per usual, she was driving me to school, the two of us dropping by the park, walking the rest of the way.

There were dahlias everywhere, pinks and ceruleans and bright shades of honey. The one she'd teasingly placed behind my ear is a pastel yellow.

My mind flickers back to the present.

Jeers.

Calls.

Words slipping into the air. Words that puncture right through my chest, so quiet that I barely hear them. But, I do. Fuck, I do.

My feet move. Step by step. Plowing forward, because if I don't, I'll collapse in entirety. Aspen High isn't a place for anyone that doesn't fit somewhere along the gray-painted spectrum. Fucking horrifying if you're the nuance, you're the color in shades of nothing.

I choose to ignore the jeers, my backpack swinging behind me. After all, I'm used to doing that shit; ignoring. Pretending that I don't hear the soft permeation of cold words in the air, or the glances, or the feeling of unsafe swirling through my chest.

And that feeling of being unsafe doesn't leave as I make my way into my next class. It definitely doesn't leave when I'm shoved to the side, my shoulder hitting against the doorway, a chuckle escaping someone's lips.