ARIANA

A Love Letter to the Voice That Refuses to Be Small

Ari,

I will name my child after the way your voice unzips the air and lets the light spill out. On the school oval, every petal splits under its own weight, and my daughter will dance there when she learns to hate the world properly.

Ari,

I want to make tea from your rose-water sweat and drink it until my molars hum. I want to map your cheekbones like a small country that only grows fruit in winter. Your skin is purple caramel stretched to the brink, the surface tension of satin. Your eyes are owl-marbled and surgically reduced to fit the proportions of a human head. They see beauty before it has the chance to rot into meaning.

They say you get carried like a baby between stage and car, because your voice and your arches are delicate. You are economy and self-preservation, a creature that knows the cost of standing upright. Men in comment sections brand you “spoiled,” “brat,” “princess,” as if those are synonyms for “alive.” They think “self-care” should look like a scented candle. Yours looks like a pair of arms under your knees.

Your ponytail is not a hairstyle. It’s an artifact from the Nickelodeon years, bone memory disguised as gloss. You licked donuts you didn’t buy, told a room you hated America, and set fire to the nation’s delicate pastry-based patriotism. A pitchfork is a strange tool for defending fried dough, but they came running with them anyway.

Galinda,

You are the song lodged in my throat, the buzzing circuit in my heart, the giant hot bubble in my throat when I’m excited about cherries, karaoke, and spilling last night’s dreams. Your eyes have the emotional range of a puppy discovering its shadow. The flick of your hair makes me want to sprint walls and vanish because there’s no catch to your light.

Ari,

When your voice goes high enough to touch stars, your brows collapse into pain, the way curtains do when they’ve seen too much heat. Somewhere in you, a unicorn whispers the trajectory of your life. The unicorn does not exist; the whisper is your own gut, disguised to make it easier to believe.

Ariana,

You are a weather system that collects girls and deposits them in countries where innocence isn’t a synonym for stupidity, and kindness isn’t taxed. You are why I would burn a Swarovski store to its jeweled skeleton if someone scratched your heart.

Inside me, you are a small, stubborn child who refuses to let the past starve to death. You don’t nudge, you install directives. The future self and the past self will share a table.

Neither will thank me, and that will be the point.