Hysterical letters to my sanity

✮ FRUSTRATION AND WOMANHOOD

I am frustrated...
I am frustrated because my body is suffocating me
Being a woman is starting to feel like bearing a back breaking weight, and I am barely one.
Not yet a woman but never a girl.
Never to be a girl; that's what I'll tell myself.
Because,
Sweet girl, pretty girl, dumb girl, cool girl, mean girl, poor girl or rich girl, girl, girl,
to be a girl sounds like crying into careless palms, hushing your brother, your mothers strained laugh.
To be a girl tastes like crystal glassware and menthol cigarettes, like chalky candy bracelets and salty tears.
Being a girl sounds like apologies and smells like strawberry lip balm.
To be a girl has grown into something more than biology, it's become a curse, an insult,
to be degraded is to be girl.
To be a girl is to be small, and weak and silent, sit still, head down, you're mouth will only be good for one use and it's damn sure not talking. Shoulders flash in adolescence rebellion, mascara wedged between tube-socks and stolen CD's.
your grandmother tells you that you look far too grown up,
asks who your trying to catch?
Am I a trap or at risk of being trapped?
Female and fatal.
"Hopefully it's quick, hopefully I don't make him mad, hopefully he still likes me!"
I'm so sick of being hopeful in the least cynical way.
I am frustrated by all the hopeful instructions.
"One day he will be kind, when he's older, when they mature they will see,"
THEY SEE NOW THEY JUST DON'T CARE.
The concept of virginity strikes me as frustrating.
The word virginity once meant something other than today, the Anglo-French and Greeks named the unmarried, young maiden, a lovely virgin; just as an unmarked stone is clean in virginity.
Or your virgin daughter, too young to marry, too fair to be alone,
too smart to one day become property.
I am frustrated because your body cannot corrupt mine, you are not important enough to change any part of my identity.
I am myself with or without you, before and after, I am just as whole or broken as I've always been.

Still I wonder— if I will flinch.