nothing else but my heart's desire [COLLECTION] | FINISHED

A Not-Girl - ORIGINAL PROSE

My hands feel dry, my skin is bruised. My eyes bleed, crying red tears, behind my light blue eyes. My skin doesnt fit right, my heart beats faster as I climb hills, as I jump over hurdles this way and that, given up something inside me for another day, another form of power and chaos all my own. But another day passes and another loss finds me here, it stabs and taunts, it strips me of something I'll never see again, never returned to me; a hand extended, I find its my own - I'll climb that hill again. I'm a not-girl, a not-woman who lives in the inbetween, who occupies the space between this life and the next. My predecessors live inside me, their hand moves and so does my own - it is not my own, no, I belong to every woman who has lived before me, who shall be here after I have returned to soil and dirt, who lived in shadows and loved in secret, who hide behind masks and looked down to avoid authoritive glares. Each woman written in verse, sung in theatre, who consumed the poison and drowned in their red tears. A not-woman in the age of ambiguity, a woman in strict terms, undefined by those who pushed back against my power, who twisted the words I screamed and wrote them in pen - passive, dilluted, unchallenged, who left me bruised by their own words and by the knives they hid behind their backs.

Not-girl, not-nothing, something I cannot know, but I'll walk and I'll look straight on, amidst the turmoil and taunts all around. Undefined and unwritten.