No 2: BOYHOOD

PHOTO COURTESY OF GARY AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

Dear god, grant me the boyhood I never had. 

Grant me sexless masculinity and a concave chest, a thoughtlessly straight spine and the stale boy-smell of a little league game or a school gymnasium. 

Grant me an unwavering eye, a vague but obsessive interest in sports, a jersey that gapes wide below my hairless armpits.

And god, if nothing else, grant me that scrawny, adolescent power my girlbody can never seem to muster, that perfect ugliness of somebody who’s never had to care–the lopsided grin, the loping gait. 

Grant me an empty heart and a mind made of vinyl or nosebleeds or whatever footballs’ pebbled surfaces are made of.

Feed me white bread and coke until I could puke on the shining sidewalk or take a feral piss into the gutter. Burn my white feet on hot sand, and I’ll wince gratefully while scaling the dunes, I’ll wipe sweat from a smooth, undeveloped brow I can passively hope might one day (too distant to imagine, of course) it’ll be a man’s brow, like my father’s, or big brother’s, or older cousin’s. 

I shudder thinking of my current, oppressively female, oppressively hot little body, this slender waist, these hips meant for bearing a million little boys and girls for a man who used to be a boy, a beautiful boy to whom I would have been absolutely nothing. Every night I dream of dreaming of sweet nothings, of despising prettiness from oblivious distance. 

Maybe I just want to bask in that comfortable invisibility like it’s the blazing sun, like I’m shirtless in a pair of grass-stained baseball pants and burning my freckled shoulders. Like practice isn’t for a few hours and I’ve got time to kill, to fill with inconsequential thoughts of left-field, or dinner tonight, or the developing peach fuzz on my cheeks. Like that’s as far as my little, giant mind can see. 

This is my boyhood, may it never turn to manhood. Amen, Aman, a Gentle Boy.