Liza Olson

My Sweet Love

My sweet love never came out quite right, never felt the way it should, so at best it was some cloying, around-the-corner-just-wait-for-it kinda thing, back when mirrors were verboten, when I finished my nights in exhaustion to stop thought, when I didn’t know who I was or maybe I did but didn’t want to meet me, was too scared to, because what do you do when you finally face your apotheosis, when you’ve used up all the breath and gotten to the place you avoided, when it’s not what you expected and yet exactly right, what do you do with that, because I tried to wash away my sweet love with whiskey and high ABV beer, with nicotine and caffeine and laceration and exsanguination and scrolling till my thumb ached and going to a temple and writing out pages and having casual sex with strangers and not sleeping for six days and ending up in the hospital, and none of it seemed to quite turn me away in the end, from you, my sweet love, that forgiveness I could never afford myself even though I’d pass it out like party favors to others, and no matter what I tried the smile wouldn’t reach my eyes, it’d stop just short, and I thought this low-burn depression was all life would ever be for me, could ever be, but my sweet love was there all the time, waiting for me to finally get it, to understand there’s no way to hate yourself into a version of you you’ll eventually love, doesn’t work that way, and that low hum started to fade the more I became me, when putting on nail polish for the first time made my dysphoria take a lap, but I didn’t know what dysphoria was then, had no definition or example, only knew the temporary quietude that came with putting on a dress, makeup with it, my sweet love an undersize chick trying to take first flight, patchy wings flapping past the hunger, in spite of it, and it isn’t perfect now but god does it get easier, do I stay happier longer, does it feel good to dissolve the estradiol under my tongue, to not quite be where I want to be but to be in it for the duration now, to see a future, to cast any unalive notions away, to look in the mirror and like what I see, to smile and to watch the way it reaches my eyes in a way it never did before, never could, and all my close ones can see it too, can feel my sweet love the same way I can: the way it was always meant to be.