Your Life - Andrea Gibson
Lyricist：Andrea Gibson
It isn't that you don't like boys
It's just that you only like boys you want to be
David with his jaw carved out of the side of a cliff
Malcolm who doesn't have secrets just stories
He owes no one
Chris the basketball hero with the tick
Blinks fifteen times when he makes a shot
You spend hours blinking in the mirror
Pretending you're a star like him
Mary Lavine calls you a dyke
You don't have the language to tell her she's wrong and right
So you just show up to her house
Promising to paint her fingernails red with what will gush from her busted face
If she ever says it again
You're in the seventh grade
You don't even know you want a girlfriend
You still believe to much in the people
Who believe in Jesus to even feel desire to its hell threat
You just want to kick your desk on the way to the principal's office
Slouch in detention
Want to cut your hair and spit out whatever you don't want in your mouth
Your own name even
Skirting around the truth
You don't yet know the boys are built in their confidence on stolen land
But you do worry the girls might be occupied with things you will never understand
Won't ever ever be good at
You take one pretty step and feel
Like you're pouring bubbles into your own bloodbath
You don't want a soft death
You want a hard life that is your life
Your life at the locker room that doesn't stop
Demanding to keep your eyes on the floor
Your life at the prom where you run home and a snowstorm
Chugging your last pair of heels in a snowbank
Realizing you are the only boy you want ever wanted to tear off for
Your life the first Christmas you spend alone
The years you learn to build your family out of scratch
Your life when someone drags you from a restroom but the color of your coat
Your life every time airport security screams pink or blue pink or blue
Trying to figure out what machine setting to run
You through choosing your life and how that made you to
Someone often finds it easy to explain your gender by saying
You are happiest on the road when you're not here or there but in between
That yellow line running down the center of it all like a godd**n sunbeam
Your name is not a song you will sing under your breath
Your pronouns haven't even invented yet
You're gonna shave your head drive through Texas
You're gonna kill your own God
So you can fall in love for the first time
They're gonna keep telling your heartbeat is a pre existing condition
They're gonna keep telling you are a crime of nature
And you're gonna look at all your options and choose conviction
Choose to carve your own heart out of a side of a cliff
Choose to spend your whole life telling secrets you owe no one till everyone
Till there isn't anyone who can insult you by calling you what you are
You holy blinking star
You highway streak of light
Falling over and over for your hard life
Your perfect life your sweet beautiful life
