No longer do I care. No longer do I care for your input on my daring intelligence, the ways in which I can hold my own in conversation, qualities you apparently didn’t see coming. No longer do I care for your compliments, your congratulations, so that I may have a man’s formal confirmation that I think just like you. No longer do I care for your feelings or how I seem to oh-so-easily shatter them when I drift against your currents, despite your appraisal of my free-floating nature. I realized that you think you own this river. But this world isn’t your river, and I’m not getting out of the water for you.

No longer do I care for your insidious, artificial care. How it isn’t soft like my care, how it lacks substance, beauty, yet prides itself on its mere presence as if the capacity to feel is the new way to flex. Emotions possess a sensitive strength, but you feign fragility, cry into fists, a shy-guy’s brass knuckle, thinking, "Maybe with force I can wield love as to yield love," thinking, "Maybe this is real love."

No longer do I feel love. I only recall trauma now. I don’t think I’ll ever fully relish glinting glances in guys’ eyes. I forecast advances, rogue lies. I think, "Bus schedules, flashlights, battery life, lit streets, running shoes, sit in the back check phone, look at feet play with thumbs, 9-1-1, baggy clothes, look pissed, if i scream who will turn their heads what if he persists?" I think in laundry lists, in Law & Order scripts, I think in headlines, Dateline, and why me? I’m growing sick of it. I’m gonna be above just surviving it.

No longer do I care for men. Not the boys that watch them, either. Not that I can't love you, nor feel for you, nor care about you. I don't want you in pain. But too many times, too many times and times again have I tried healing dogs that kept biting back. I think, "He's hurt. He doesn't know any better." But he does. He does! It was I who didn't know better. I'm hurt.

Don't be telling me I was just hanging around the wrong dogs when I've gone to teachers, counselors, principals, parents, strangers, people. They all just saw what I'd initially saw. A good boy. How many times I've had to hear, "Just ignore him. Oh, him? He wouldn't hurt a fly! He's scrawny. He's even younger than you. He's even shorter than you. I know his father, he's a good man! He'd never let him do that." To not be believed, when they intentionally cornered me, when they're more strategic than you'd think, when they seem to carry a sort of hive-mind hush-hush about these sorts of thingsthat just happen sometimes. The cold silence that follows. Or is it a numb silence? An indifferent silence?

I'm trusting the signs, the instincts, the gut feelings I normally would pass off as a discriminatory prejudice. For me, as it stands, it's an earned prejudice, a thought I'd never hope to arrive at just to be on the safe side. I'm refusing to care past a certain point. I'm not trying to catch falling knives anymore. I shouldn’t have to think of it as a success to survive encounters at school, a family gathering or an online chat. So I’ve come to a triumphant conclusion. If they don’t let off, I no longer care about getting mad or making a scene, I’m not backing down at the the thought of it getting ugly. I no longer care how it looks.

I’m placing all of my care on mine and others’ protection, no longer the power I’ve been fooled to think they have over me. At first, it won’t be easy, but I’m making it my obligation to call it out as I and everyone else sees it as it's happening. To call their bullsh*t on trains, in classrooms, in small talk, I'll shout if need be. Anything to break the silence.