When Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed, my ongoing dissertation on “The Existential Exhaustion of American Women” grew by ten pages. A woman walking in a city is a revolution. We tarp ourselves in self-consciousness, try to make our limbs untouchable, but nothing stops the whistles or calls or the dagger voices and fingers of men. I haven’t gone outside in shorts and a tank top since I was 12. I cannot go outside at night, or even midday, in Paris or any city, without that disappointment accumulating. Making you into someone impossible, because men in reality so constantly disappoint me. Do I outgrow this kind of lust- the conceptual fuck? Making you into what I want. I crashed into the strangest parts of being alive. Sappho was stung with love and so was I you stung every crooked shutter in me. How we cleaved out a space for ourselves, a bunker buried underneath the dirt, our writing spinning us like Penelope and her threads. An ecology of girl-want, of desire accepting desire. We wrote fanfiction, so many of us, thousands, and read, shared, clicked, liked, offered feedback. I made poetry of the too-much kind, the kind that scares boys and parents. I wanted to think about you more than I wanted you for real. I could be scarlet hot for you in secret. I didn’t need to worry about the consequences that women are always warned will come from our desire. I contorted you, Harry, into my own sublime, reaching it, scraping its lavish edges, delirious with its fragrance, its undulating and rose-glossed mouth. He writes with a stillness I cannot cultivate he writes about the sublime. There’s a book I love: Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton. Everything is so much, all the time, and I hang onto casual by its threads, frayed and slipping. My father told me I needed a mantra if I was to ever successfully meditate. The compression of my girlhood: learning smallness, imbibing my unimportance through gulps of everyday America. What is a girl’s obsession? What will – what can – it do, become, transcend? As soon as I recognize it, there is a crater of longing in my heart, overstuffed, leaking and ravenous. The rapists/hunters/president/judge will never ownĪnd when that box opened, she was brave enough to share it with the world to protect this country. When their fireworks detonate and music blaresĪnd no hunter will ever climb this mountain When we see taxidermied heads over fireplaces We founded Olympus Mons and from the peak Judicial system of this country, she was triggered, and Possibly put in the highest position of power in the Woman saw that Judge Kavanaugh was going to be It can cause complete avoidance of not wanting toĮven remember or think about what happened to you.īut what I believe that I have seen is that when this They demand to know how we distinguish camouflageīut they still want to take a sword to our skin I can’t tell you of an intruder in my fox denĬhristine, Stefani, Amy, Fran, Tyler, Maya can What it does is it takes the trauma and it puts it in aīox and it files it away and shuts it so that we can The girls, the silent boys, the humans drawn without lines My sisters, my brothers, my fellow survivors, Someone calls my name and no one walks across the stage Scientific proof - it’s biology - that people change. If someone isĪssaulted or experiences trauma, there’s science and The five year old, the nine year old, the teenager,Īnd I also know this woman is smart because she’s a To high school when homecoming is a sweat smearīehind the tapestry I taped up for the outsideĪnd the answer is ‘yes.’ And I’ll tell you why. When I told myself I could not kiss Sabrina The dress and flats for preschool graduation Should we trust that she remembers the assault?’ ‘She has no memory of how she got to the party. Trump, the other day, was speaking at a rally, and he said,
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