Mason was my first case of unrequited love. He liked the girls that were small, lean, and could write their names in cursive. Those were three things that I was not. Worse, he liked girls who mindlessly repeated what the teacher said, who hid sedately in the corner of the playground during recess, and who ate apple slices demurely without ever gaining an ounce. And, even though I knew that he would avoid me, I couldn’t help but chase him from the classroom through the monkey bars and straight into the wilder corners of my imagination. After nearly a decade of keeping up the chase, I’ve come to realize that I’ve always been the huntress, pursuing prey throughout my range to fill a deep hunger that never remained sated.

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While Mason awakened yearning with his unforgiving specificity, he was not first to provoke desire in me. I have always wanted to be the best version of myself: the one that could shout out her own answers, the one that could climb the fire pole on the playground, or the one that could eat real food and have it glow from the interstices of my skin. I knew I could do all of these things, but I was told time and time again that I didn't have the wings to accomplish them. I was destined to be a beautiful Alexandra’s birdwing butterfly in a cluster of spiders, but that’s perilous when the spiders weave their orbs in every direction. 

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The year before Mason, I was dropped in a spot at the back of my second grade  classroom by the dusty books that had letters that intimidated my searching fingers. Lauren was reading books that had tiny letters, which meant she was better than I was. I wanted to sit with her at the blue table of all the smartest and most fluent readers in the class. I was refused a spot at the table, and I had to glare over at all their cheery faces laughing every day. Despite the egalitarian words that were spoken, the message I received was that I was inferior to other students. The other children were flying, and I knew I could too, but couldn’t get over that I didn't have any wings, yet. 

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Although I was shadowed to the back of the classroom, I clawed my way up by the time I had reached fifth grade. I could proudly say I was the smartest person in my class. I knew that, and so did every other person. I wore a gold studded crown on my head that matched my devious, unfiltered mouth. I would proudly shout the big words in my writing class and spit long division facts in math class. I’d flail my arm in the air to answer the questions and then stop my teacher when she erred grammatically. I got cold stares and jealous remarks from the other students that were just as agitated as my teacher herself. Every comment and glare ripped down my throat and infected my guts. My stomach hurt more often than not. The antics, or so she called them, enraged my teacher, and she informed my parents that I would need to be quieter, gentler, and meeker. “She needs to stay muted and stop being so flamboyant. She’s making the other students feel bad.” I wanted to get up on her stool and cry out in front of the group of ten year olds. She set me up to be her outcast, like a xenophobe before a foreigner, in a classroom meant to nurture butterflies. 

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I found myself learning a new version of that same song when I was fourteen. My grades were far from perfect and I had to work my nose to the grindstone, far more than eighth grade. I was dissatisfied with being just eighth in the class and just a 4.3 GPA. Maybe if I worked a little harder, I could have been ranked first. Yet I found myself surrounded by both peers and adults who were either indifferent or judgmental towards me as I sought to grow, to improve.  

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The same was true for golf. I was constantly trying to perfect every aspect of my game, and having any score above par was a flaw in my character. Mistakes were the result of my laziness. If I put in more hours at the range, I wouldn’t have embarrassed myself at states. 

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Those thoughts echoed during basketball season, as I only started three times and scored seven points. If I would've stayed after hours once basketball practice was over, I could have started every game. I joined the team to try the game. I figured, since I was an ape with arms like beanstalks, I’d be decent. My golf coach, who is also the junior high basketball coach, encouraged me to sign up and went out of his way to help me at the beginning of the basketball season. He knew that I was ignorant about how to run down the sidelines and dribble with my head up, but he persisted. He had me drill and even skipped one of his own games to come and watch me play at mine. That game, I didn’t even score. I sweat profusely and I engraved the plays, in order, into the back of my skull. I wish I would’ve at least scored when the man who generously helped me came to watch me play. He was proud of me regardless, but I couldn’t realize that. 

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Tenacity ruptures my veins when textbooks or golf clubs are placed in my hands, but not with a basketball. I was never articulate with the way my hands could shoot, dribble and know which side to guard. Basketball was not a sport where I excelled, so, uncharacteristically, I left it. I was accustomed to dominating in everything that I tried. I couldn’t be the one that sat on the benches during games. I wanted to be the one who scored all the points and everyone cheered. I was never taught to be neglected, nor did I ever like it, so I had to pursue all the recognition I could get.

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I have come to realize my determination to be either ranked or seeded first began at a very young age. However, while I constantly internalized academics, I was forced to realize that everything about athletics comes down to the external version of myself, something that is foreign. To prove my worth athletically, which, to me, meant dominating my opponents, I had to be lean and light enough to run down my prey, whether on the basketball court or the soccer field. This obsession with weight was established long before, and in an unexpected context. 

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In November when I was eight, my school hosted the play of The Wizard of Oz. They cast all the third graders to be either munchkins or ballerinas. I told my Grammy all about it, and she sewed me a beautiful munchkin dress I was so eager to wear. However, I soon learned that I wasn’t going to be either a ballerina or a munchkin, but I would be masked as a flying monkey that blended into the shadowy, black background. Being labeled as “big,” which I saw as synonymous with “fat,” and casting me as a flying monkey and not a ballerina was crippling to my self image. 

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I channeled my energy and frustration into soccer until the age of eleven. After seven years of it, I thought I’d be a little healthier. I was not. “Stop beating on yourself, Kayla. It’s only going to make it all worse.” They’d say. “But you should lose a few, you know.” I was incomparably larger and more destructive on the soccer field than any of the other players. None of the other teams wanted to play against me because they all heard about the girl that vomited after a direct shot to the stomach by me from fifty yards out. They even refused to shake my hand at the end of games. I craved the attention of being the best player, which made me forget my size for some time. Unfortunately, my time in soccer was fleeting. I quit soccer at the peak of my days in elementary school, when I realized that I would now have to play with the same girls who knew not an ounce of basic sportsmanship.

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I would then need to wait until the outset of my freshman year to distinguish myself athletically, when I joined the golf team purely because I enjoyed the sport. My teammates, all older boys, acted as though they were indifferent toward me, which I just accepted, but mostly because I shot lower scores. My dad, the man who carried my bag, was captivated by my season. But he told me that next year, I was going to work harder than ever and be victorious. 

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In contrast, I’d have to play freshman basketball with the same girls that crossed their fingers that I wouldn't be chosen to play on their team at recess in fifth grade. We’d play every day, and every time, I’d always get picked last, and my teammates would neglect me throughout the game. They didn’t want a fat, slow girl to be on their team. I wanted to scream all the crazy, awful things that spiraled in my mind, but that would upset those thin, athletic, frail children. It might cause a scene, and those popular students would have a hard time accepting a girl calling them out for their flexible morals. Deja vu struck me, and it was fifth grade throughout basketball season. I won't be playing again. I wish I could play a sport that lets me enjoy the camaraderie of being a part of a team, but I know now, I will be exiled time and time again.

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I wished that my unrequited loves would turn back, but it was never meant to be. I was never supposed to grow wings with Mason, or any of the other children. They expected me to watch from the ground, while they all flew above the trees. There was never an ounce of acceptance in his demagogic, high pitched, eight-year-old tone. 

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Hunger was my second largest battle, and diets were my sword. I’d drool over my friends at the lunch table, who ate without worries or thought. They didn’t understand how I tried to feed one hunger through another. I fasted to become the vibrant image that danced through the rims of my kaleidoscope. Despite my best efforts, I quit my first diet in fourth grade. My cravings consumed all the mental strength I had left. How could anyone expect a nine year old to react with endless forbearance when sweet, unhealthy treats were placed at the tip of her tongue? I confessed to my dad, shaking from the nervousness of the ambiguity of it all. He was obviously disappointed for me, but he would lie to save me from tears. 

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When I was twelve, I always wondered why my body wasn't as slim, short, and perfect as my best friend’s, Charlotte’s. She and I were so often compared that it became normal for me to compare our bodies, too. Peripherally, all the other girls were getting boyfriends from the middle school downtown and were preyed on by some of the high school boys. Charlotte set the beauty standard. I concluded that there was significantly more that I was in control of and could change than I was exercising control over. I asked myself why I shouldn’t simply take control. Never mind that I was already five feet, nine inches tall. Never mind the musculature already present on my frame. I could be 94 pounds like my best friend; I wasn’t working hard enough. 

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 So I went on a diet, a secret diet, in seventh grade. The only people I let in on the secret were my closest group of five friends. I rode along the journey with much support from those friends, through the whole ill-considered ride. They’d tell me “No carbs or sugar. Just have some more blueberries. You’ll be fine.” They made me believe that sugars were my largest battle, and that an active twelve-year-old could live on 800 calories a day. I’d reinforce my diet with countless crunches, lunges, and squats until my body was shaky from the last drop of energy swirling through my cells. I was thirsty for a break. 

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I was always placed in the back of the desk rows so the thinner, shorter children could see over the atlas moth I resembled. I was drowned in the crowd by the sixth graders– the ultimate insult. I had never caught the attention of boys, since they were intimidated by me. Would their behavior have changed if they knew that I denied myself so much for them? Would I have stayed my hand from reaching for the raspberry cheesecake if I knew how little they would care? Charlotte got so many more flashes and waves from all the franchised males who lurked in the trees. The only attention I got was when we did the mile and the whole class was sitting there, waiting for my faltering body to finish the lap. 

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The summer of my thirteenth birthday, a boy tricked me into believing the spiders in my stomach were actually butterflies. He gave me the sun that I desired and, in return, he got the validation he solely wanted over and over again. I let him see the colors underneath my wings because I trusted him. He deceived me into believing that this was the perfect place for his huntress. 

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I was expecting the boy from the summer to be my spaniel and my grades to be perfect at the start of high school. I was beautiful: I lost so much weight, changed my style, and changed everything about myself. I was in the wrong. The boy ghosted me and ignored me like I was his used, shed cocoon that lay famished in the dirt. Not long after, he got a girlfriend, a girl who was the epitome of my larva. I was devastated after realizing he never really wanted me to share this home with him. 

I finally felt excellent my freshman year. I won a national award for my poetry. I spilled all these emotions and hardships at the time onto the page. I transformed these feelings into lively, bright characters that danced around, seemingly in my imagination. Every achievement I earned, it was another gold star for me, but every achievement that I didn't receive felt like a lost opportunity. 

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Still, I felt like I had made absolutely no progress, since I hadn’t received validation from anyone externally, or even from myself. That’s what I wanted most. I never liked disappointment. In my mind, every mistake I made was something wrong with me. 

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My parents recognized my successes,and I assumed they expected me to live up to expectations that were somehow set, not by me or them, but naturally occurring. I had never gotten in trouble, and the day I was caught for having gum in my mouth terrified me, because I didn't want my parents to discover my perfect seven-year-old reputation had been tarnished. It took years to realize that my parents accepted me, flaws and all. Truly believing that they were proud of my accomplishments was an ancillary benefit.   

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I wrote a lot. My parents knew nothing about how much I wrote and journaled and I still don't wish to uncover those anxiety-filled stories that will remain intertwined with my childhood. The boy from the summer was my long standing entity that could never own those journal pages like Mason did. He was always consuming the shelves of my mind and taking up more space than he should have. He would have looked better on paper. Yet the only thing I kept from my experience of him was my national award. By the time I had won it, he had already departed out of the thick air, a raven escaping into night. He knew nothing about the iota of credit he deserved. 

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I have finally uprooted the secret that has been shaking my trunk: I am an exile. My home, such as it has been, is not and has not been a place that I can remain. I have been accused of being an outcast time and time again, and I have been deaf to those accusations, until now. I cannot be the blackened door mat. I was put here by chance and forced to live surrounded by spiders. 

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I’ve come to feel like a lion trapped in a petting zoo. My greatest achievements have yet to come, but for now I am barricaded by spider webs that have tied me to this void. When I find the place where destiny will put me, I will know it and so will everyone else. I could merely lay on my side as children pet me and I’m fed raw steaks from a safe distance, but acceptance of this fate is no more in my nature than it is in the nature of a butterfly to remain in her cocoon. If the caterpillar has no room to grow, how could other caterpillars that rest below the ground sing out to her once she emerges from her cocoon? Once my wet wings sense the direction of their pull, the only thing I’ll be able to do is soar over this ephemeral ‘home’. That lion inside will rupture her cage, for I cannot be trapped for long. I have seen the best and worst of all the devious spiders that think their minuscule arms could even dare to put the lion down. Instead, they’ll see a butterfly weave her way through their best webs while they are caught in their own machinations. They'll see a lion roar back at the rising sun.