Welcome to 12
Welcome to your voice cracking on its way down.
Welcome to anger, to fists that ball up before thoughts.
Welcome to your body as a fog with unclear edges that nevertheless hits things hard.
Welcome to your mind galloping faster, to making more things to gallop over.
Welcome to the edge of the endless content of desire.
Welcome to publicity, to shame, to the cruelty of others as they look for themselves.
Welcome to the collision of your life and the fully indexed, searchable, unforgetting expression of it.
Welcome to power, to strength and speed, to the ropes of muscle in your limbs.
Welcome to all sorts of coarse hair.
Welcome to the feeling of smooth skin as foreign and therefore a revelation.
Welcome to reaching the tops of things.
Welcome to the feeling that those songs you stream could have leaked from your own heart.
Welcome to jokes about having some dirt on your upper lip, to people pretending to flick away a caterpillar under your nose.
Welcome to a talk about how to choose a lather, brush or gel, how to run a blade along your face without a ribbon of blood unspooling on your cheek.
Welcome to shaving for pretty much ever.
Welcome to being the object of desire, to the heat of another’s need on your neck.
Welcome to not being an object of desire and knowing it.
Welcome to all the naked people.
Welcome to sex and love and pain.
Welcome to talking and not talking about sex and love and pain.
Welcome to the intoxication of aloneness, of being responsible only for yourself.
Welcome to not just witnessing my ignorance but being disappointed by it.
Welcome to feeling not just not understood but not understandable.
Welcome to hugging your mother (still) with your arms above hers.
Welcome to your body as coil, as wire wound tight.
Welcome to not fitting in the world, to a world of new edges.
Welcome to the inflated currency of now.
Welcome to the puzzle of self, one that deepens in its solving.
How would you welcome someone to 12? Respond below and/or post your responses on Twitter with #welcometo12, and I’ll collect and share.
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