Being free

My mother pulls at my self-constructed outfit with a tight-lipped smile stretching the cheeks she passed down to me. Says that my colors aren't in season or that I have no waist here or that my skirt is too short and I cannot take it, yet I stomp away to follow orders and change.
My sister, four years my junior, rolls her eyes at my raucous laughter, my animation and admiration by the fault of ideas embodied on projected screens. Tells me they're just stories and you're so weird and calm down and I will not stand for this! Yet shame rolls in me once the elation has ebbed and poison tugs at my brainstem when the boy from Spanish catches my eye--but he'll think I'm weird!
My father grumbles and switches stations before the reporter can say the second syllable of "gay rights," gripes with my mother about Colorado's newly legal "potheads" with the "dude" thrown in for extra spite. Says that this movie may not be appropriate and you're not going to New York and why do you keep sabotaging yourself? and I hold my tongue.
My little conservative Christian family portrait. Parents from small towns, perfect church attendance records, with at least one daughter determined to carry on the family legacy. That daughter who wearies her mother with acidic judgements passed in secret, that daughter who knows exactly what she believes and what she wants and will get it no matter the cost. The daughter I want to learn from, but instead lock myself away from and back away from being glared upon. My little conservative Christian family portrait--except in it I have but half a face, the other cut away from the lens's short sight because I need to be free. Free from the hate that tumbles unwittingly from their lips, free from the loving eyes that endanger my open range, free from the shelter they have provided for me. There are wings beating madly against my teeth and half-formed passions threaten to slip out and make them angry but at least I will be free!
But not yet. Not all the way, because some things out there are wrong, I do agree. But because I am not you and I am me I have known what you refuse to and that is: there is no way that one can speak walls of hate around themselves and be free.

Nobody is equal

Nobody is equal.
You nod and clap and mumble your amens as I stand, washed out by the lone white light and my own fear, but you do not understand. The sands of time have whittled the human heart a cage of bones far more rigid than the ones of our origins. It's evolution, you see--when the world becomes larger we must become hard, carry the quivering deeper and deeper inside to keep our stone-ground weapon steady. The human race has fought so far that there are no sharpened rocks left, no, now our first line of offense is lightning accusations and green cloth-paper promises.
I have never known a world without push-button philosophy, without digital exposure and innocence lost long before thirteen, fourteen. In a way I was never clean, only quiet about what I had heard and seen, passed along secondhand from the mouths of my schoolmates into my caged heart with forming wings. I learned in a way I knew was never meant to be. "A victim of the digital age!" The wrinkles fall into frowns which fall into stern disapproval of all that is rapidly moving yet never seems to change.
But this is nothing all that strange. The world has made us hard and it has become heredity, children born from serenity into a decaying carcass filled past its limits, forever asking questions and there are only wrong answers. Wrong answers, wrong actions, wrong skin wrong face wrong sex wrong faith wrong existence. And the right answers flicker and change like visions.
Tell me that nobody is equal and I will shout "YES!" because we all know it deep within our unbreakable ribcages that there is no louder truth. Tell me who is not equal and I will fall silent. Because my answer is wrong.