To You When You’re Twelve and You Hate Yourself:

There are things that only people who really love you will tell you. Like, quiet as it’s kept, most of your headspace will be taken up by a seventh-grade field trip, one in mid-May to Water Mania, where all the young ladies will have to wear the same red swimsuit, but only yours will be the one with very pubescent pubic hair seeping out the sides, spirals pushing against the spandex. Everyone will see, will jab their boy friends in the ribs to holy shit, look look look. You’ll wonder what, you’ll ask, What? And no one will tell you, because you should have known, you should have known how humiliating it is to have a body.

That’s it, kid. In the end, the bush creeps down your thighs and up to underneath your navel. In some years, your skin will seethe, split into stretch marks, bright red on black skin because you keep becoming more you, bigger and more buoyant. Then you’re twenty-six with a discerner’s spirit, you’ve mostly forgiven yourself for not being all the way beautiful, and yet, you still wonder silly things, like if people see you as ridiculous but just won’t say so. What if seventh graders are the best type of people there are because at least they let you know everyone does see you, that you are real. You wonder if you’ll ever know anyone who loves you enough to tell you. 

 Love you to bits and pieces, and maybe back together again. 

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Erica Frederick (@ericafrederick) is a queer, Haitian-American writer and MFA candidate in fiction at Syracuse University, where she serves as Salt Hill Journal’s fiction editor. She writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in worry, in Blackness, in Florida suburbia. She is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the winner of the 2021 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation College Fiction Award.