Things that I know

I am not a genius.  I am geographically challenged. In my mother's eyes, I am still as precious as the warm, pink, and round little fact that grew five scraggly fingers and two ginormous eyes beneath her wedding dress. I stand luckier than yesterday in my lime green socks, one hundred and seventy-five centimetres of one million miscalculations. But what I do know—what I know with my whole, fist-sized, blood-filled heart—is that my existence was not one of them. I was born out of love and longing.

I line my pockets with all my curiosities. I fill my suitcase with every good and gritty thing I’ve ever done. And now, I must add another number to my miscalculations, because I have lied about my height by a single centimetre. I am not a liar. My body is an exoskeleton. I was born on the 26th of October, which makes me a Scorpio, which means I cannot help the way my insides have become my outsides.

My insides are my stories. My stories are like tastebuds on a warm, pink tongue—desperate to be fed. They spill out of me like untameable secrets. They love, and lick, and slobber over everyone they can touch. I think love is a bed in a quiet room, made and waiting for me to fall into it. And because two things can be true at once, I know that somewhere I am the monster under the bed of something I could not love. Love is a doorway (I think. I don’t know yet). What I do know is that what we want—more than anything—is for someone to make room for us. To make us a bed, to keep us safe inside their body. I know love is something you don’t walk away from. 

I know I am the kind of person I want to be. I know I won’t feel this way forever. But for these twenty-four delicious hours, I am certain I have done something right. My name is hardly ever spelled right, and that alone feels like a gift from my parents. Peyton is something no one can quite put their finger on. And so, I know love by the way someone says my name. I know love because of two extraordinary, inseparable hearts. I know love as the distance between two things, and between Mark and Lynelle Hutchins, it is whole and fist-sized. 

I know I am a miracle, because I am here. I know I am only eleven minutes away from that same front door I leapt from this morning. I know that the empty skip bin on the corner of Clifton marks my final turn. And that, as desperate for Spring as I am, there is a lemon-less lemon tree waiting for me to come home.