You can keep your fairy dust.

Keep your fairy dust, your pinks and sparkles, your lace and ballet shoes. I have no use for them – I’d rather breathe freely, heavily, sweating and panting but content, than choking on glitter and inhaling the epitome of daintiness. Stay trapped between glossy magazine pages, if you want to. Drink from poisonous words of self-hatred and bird-bone fragile ideals from broadcasted streams of perfect lips, to the dehydration of your ever paling sense of self. When I wear black, it is to match a million stars and provide enough vastness for whole clusters of myriadically coloured nebulae. I wear white, and it is the canvas for my life, my future, to be painted in all the shades of songs, laughter, hopes, fears, grief, joy, success, failure, grounded optimism and meaningful relationships instead of strained efforts to be nothing but happy, living in a cheerful bubble made of denial and digital filters, where performance and pretence replace the art of living. There is no place for pink and powdery pastels in my wardrobe, as even my skin is but a parchment providing space to be inked with maps of adventures yet untold, to count in tiny scars and bruises my encounters with trees and brambles and mock fights. I dance en pointe in sneakers along supermarket aisles, skip through train stations, and do backbends and cartwheels on the dancefloor to feel like myself. I am free when I do the dishes at midnight and chase clouds with my camera at lunch. My fairy kingdom is made of moss and sticks instead of plastic castles, and I’m not a princess but a guard, an explorer, sometimes even a warrior queen hunting for rocks. I’ve been too old to fit into cute clothes since I was able to read excavation diaries and old legends. I tried to dress up, to paint a mask over my freckled pale face. I tried, and all that is called pretty failed me, as it clashed with my shoulders’ harshness, crashed on my collarbones, and shattered like sea-glass on old rocks, creating not the harmony promised by pink packages of perfumed herbal teas but only discord in my eyes, visible for all. The only intersection of my dreams and the ones they try to sell with airbrushed billboards is the wish for a horse, a strong and loyal horse to carry me beyond the end of busy road, to where the reign of media ends and the realm of reality begins.