They say I wasn't born quite right, cocooned in the absence of symmetry, my joints and my flesh simply too malleable to contain the more grotesque parts, the inner shreds of me that, too, did not develop properly in the womb that couldn't hold me, my spine curved at the top and knotting the vertebrae around my throat and I just can't seem to keep myself afloat here. I look at myself and I try not to look at myself. I look at myself. I look. I really do look, but I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary; I live here and I love here even if my skin bruises and cracks underneath the weight of my loving, how I've always existed to crush and to crash down on the airport runways because my body can't keep the fuel in. Too sick. My hips dip down in different paths, my body bent and crumbling for the embrace of disorder, my body subservient to the genetic brokenness I am unable to escape. My physical form, following a path to downfall with the same reverence I reserve only for God. My ribs keep slipping out of place, trying to escape me. To return.

When I was diagnosed, they bent my body in different ways to see if I looked beautiful under the illuminating light of a medical office, my bones strung into a shrine over the examination table. I don't know what they decided, but if I were to guess, I'd say that they only pitied me, and that isn't very nice. I don't want to be pitied, but then I don't want to die young or painfully or ever and every day my body finds a new circle of exhaustion and the universe, all of its love considered, is still not beholden to what I want. I like to think the universe was built like me—imperfectly, because perfection can only be found in God, because reaching out for symmetry is going to kill me one day and I want him to know that I held on even as each part of me dislocated. My fingers jellied. My hands fever-warmed and clasped. My feet buried themselves deep in the sand so I don't get swept away. My body. My body says: hold on, begs me with ache to keep my composure. So I hold on! What else am I going to do?