My name is Rian.

I think. Everything is twisting in my head and my stomach hurts and I don’t want to think about anything anymore because it’s all too confusing. I am a discarded ball of yarn, tangled and worn and knotted. I can’t sort it out anymore, can't keep it neat and ordered.

A jumble of yarn lying in the corner, once glowing in bright colours- pride colours- now bleached by the sun. That is me. I’m so tired and so sad and so confused and all I want to do is sleep or maybe scream or anything that will take me away from the awful moment that is now.

My secret is surrounding me and pressing into my thoughts, nagging at me, pricking at me, threatening me. People can’t know. The people who can do already and it doesn’t help. It still gets too much too fast too hard.

My secret is this: no one knows my name is Rian. I go by something else, something that I will not tell but carries about as much significance to me than a label on a pickle jar does to the pickles. Recently, I have had trouble responding to my “real” name.

Because I am a lie.

I am not A Girl. I am not My Name.

But I’m not A Boy, either, and even though that would be hard it would be simpler. I could at least know myself to be sure, to be true, even if no one else does.

But I’m something in the middle, and no label fits and nothing feels right. Nothing nothing nothing, just a floating blob in a grey mass. My body is wrong and I am wrong and a lie and all of it all of it all of it.

Sometimes I think I can’t keep going because it’s too hard and there’s no definition. I’m standing in quicksand that keeps shifting and I can never keep my footing.

I don’t see how this gets better. I don’t know how I can be me.

But I want to be, so desperately.