Nonfiction – Issue 12

Facts are either beautiful or they leech the beauty from things.

Before my idiot dribble of adulthood, I was young once & because I was often in rooms filled with music there was dancing. Somewhere in Old City Philly…

Instead, as my shell collection on Oʻahu gathers dust, as my name grows too small to be held in the mouths of those who loved me as a child, I gather violets.

To be aromantic and asexual is to find oneself wearing assumptions that don’t fit, to find oneself veering from an expected life trajectory—following an absence or negation of markers, following a quiet inner logic.