The Changeling's Lament - Shira Lipkin

The Changeling's Lament
by Shira Lipkin


the girl's voice
the changeling voice

I have studied so hard
to pass as one of you.
I've spent a lifetime on it.

I have tells.
Blisters, tremors, bruises,
all the signs that I was not meant for your world,
was not meant to be contained
in your clothes,
your shoes.
I have this terribly inconvenient allergy
to cold iron.
Hives, really.
Welts.
I stand out.

When I was little, I asked my alleged mother, what's a girl? She said you, you're a girl, and she laced me into dresses (that I tore off in the school parking lot, in line for the bus). Laced me into ballet shoes that left blisters and bloodied my feet until I had calluses. Which she had filed off, beauticians pinning me down, because it's not beauty if you don't bleed. My dancing was different. My dancing was swaying treelike, or launching myself across the room, spinning madly, but that is not what girls do, not human girls, not ladylike, not contained. And everything is about containment is about being delicate and pretty laced into corsets whalebone stays digging into your ribs because it's not beauty if it doesn't hurt. But I studied. I pretended. I hid the bruises and the tics. I hid the big dark parts of me. I tamed my hair. I watched my mouth. I hid my magic. I did not speak of such things because we do not speak of such things – not anger, not homesickness, not longing. Not this sense that I don't know what the hell a human girl is and I can tell, I can, that everyone knows I don't belong here. I laugh too loud; I am too fast or slow to laugh. I am an anthropologist in the field of girl. I study but none of it ever comes naturally. None of it is in my nature. I am something larger, more fluid, less constrained. But I am stranded in this place. I have had to learn how to live here. I have tried. So hard.