Caution by Sadie Cardenas

I wish humans came with labels.
Not labels like ethnicity, or sexuality- but the things we really care about. The things you can never uncover in the first meet.

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The things that will determine who you can trust. The things that you won’t find unless you dig for days and months and even years until you find it. And then you lay your eyes upon it and your windpipe twists in a knot. You freeze there on the spot, drenched in sweat, arms caked with dirt and clutching a shovel, too deep in to claw your way out.
It doesn’t have to be anything too dramatic. Just the turn offs, the good stuff. The ugly bits no one will ever tell you right away. We can brand our chests with block letters and bright colors. They would all mean different things: red - STOP: History of manipulation and narcissism. Yellow - CAUTION: Emotional trauma and paranoia.
Y’know. Stuff like that.
The rarest colors would be orange and blue. Orange, construction ahead, which would mean this person is actively trying to heal what has broken inside of them. Blue, for disabled drivers; this person will have accepted that they are flawed and are learning to live with it.
It might be prying, too revealing, for what are these qualities if not the things we try our best to hide? They become visible once they are known, like burns ravaging our faces, stitched-up scars across our stomachs that keep our intestines from falling out. We cannot take these signs off, no matter how hard we try or how much we want to. They are necessary because they test people on whether or not they decide to push forward, to take a chance on you and whatever terrors hide beneath your flesh.
The reason I wish for these signs is because I wish I could wear one myself. I don’t know what color it would be; perhaps a mix of red and yellow and maybe flecks of blue. That way people could read the words I can’t say. That way you could know why I can’t love you the way that I should.
It isn’t that I don’t want to, or that any of it is your fault. It’s just me, me and the reversed evolution that made me into a creature of habit that is crushed willingly by the rock I live under, unmoving, unadaptable, and unable to do so. Awkward and ungainly, I cower alone in the shadows because it is all I know, flinching when a light is shined upon my face, growling when I am called beautiful, scurrying farther away because I know how much you mean it. I try to picture what you see, how it could possibly be me, when all that meets me in the mirror are clammy, gnarled hands, beady eyes, scaly skin, and heart that has been bruised and used to black and blue, too damaged to give to anyone.
It isn’t that I don’t want to. It’s how badly I do.
Because I know that if I was a little braver, a little stronger, I could do it. I could feel my way out of the dark, step out to meet the blinding light and immerse myself in your arms, relish in your smile knowing it is for me, return it. I could fold you into the cage of my embrace, whisper in your hair that you are safe even though I know it is a lie, close my eyes and pretend not to hear the ticking of the sun as it goes down, fading with every second. I could tell you that I love you just as much as you love me and feel the drop of my stomach as you look up at me with that radiant tragedy of a smile and I realize the mistake I have made. There is no way to take it back, and I’m still not ready to mean it, but I feel so safe in this warmth, safe and so afraid, and you draw me closer. I already see your disappointment carried by the approaching clouds in the horizon. Because I know the minute you unravel me, my labyrinth of a disguise that I have spent a lifetime cultivating, you will leave me, and I, without you holding me up and keeping me alive, will collapse into the earth, rotting with the dirt, a purple hyacinth blooming over my grave to whisper the apology I can no longer voice.
I would be as sorry then as I am now. Because you are good. And bright, and so beautiful, and my trembling hands cannot hold you like you deserve. My voice barely functions in stuttering stops and starts, and my mind is a junkyard of mangled nerves and helpless daydreams, every thought so muddled with both that I can’t tell what’s real or what’s not. But for you I am willing to try, to fit together the jagged pieces of myself and be the someone you see, someone I can love too. Yet I can’t do it alone. Read my sign, and that much you will know.
There are so many things I am not able to tell you, things that I have not yet learned to shape into words. If you read my sign, and you can walk the other way, I won’t be mad. I’ll understand.
But if you read my sign, and you reach out to me anyways, knowing full well that you have read the crux of my being summarized part and parcel, then proceed. But have caution.

​Sadie Cardenas has not yet been accepted by any publishers, but she is a high school student in the Creative Writing conservatory and specializes in writing for the fantasy, horror, and romance genre, and, as a biracial (Irish-Colombian) lesbian author, tries to incorporate as much diversity in her work as possible.