There is a thing you should know before reading this tale. Despite my best efforts, I still do not know how to love myself. But here is the secret that nobody told me. It's okay. It's okay to feel like you're drowning inside your own bones sometimes. It's okay to weep like a sky devoured a storm. It's okay to be aware that there are wounds in you still that you aren't letting heal. Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self–love is complicated.
The platinum blood spilled of Gods killing their own.
Reminding them all that women are used to violence from birth.
But I was brutal and violent in a way they tell women not to be.
Now old wounds paint the ground we live on crimson.
Are they bad people? They're hurt people, and they have been taught that the only way to overcome that hurt is through hurting others.
Death did not make sense to me even though I was raised alongside it.
You cannot destroy a family. Even if you try. Even through war. Some part of them always remains.
weep and weep and weep.
Home is where comfort lives.
I don't know how isolated I have been until I meet other children.
Too many memories of places that have met death more than they have met children.
I know how to handle noise better than how to handle silence.
Hands that do not harm.
They spill blood the way others spill water.
I learn that day how awful regret can taste when it wears the skin of your own mistakes and you cannot look away; all you have is your own discomfort and no one else to blame.
It happens suddenly. One day, your parents don't pick you up anymore. Responsibilities grow. Your mother starts focusing on other things. Maybe a job or a sibling. You grow a bit quieter. Maybe it's because of A Thing That Happened To You. Whatever the reason may be, one day you are small, and hold a world of games inside your chest. And the next, suddenly none of the games make any sense.
No one will tell you why the blood you lose monthly from your womb is different from the blood you lose from your fingers — why only one of them is a matter of shame.
This is just fate, luck, the card game of life. They must have done something wrong in a previous life. They just aren't like us. They aren't like us.
Animals come from purer parts of the universe. They are not like us.
I wish I had the freedom of a boy.
If enough magazines say it.
If enough girls in school talk about it.
If enough ads on TV emphasize it.
If enough of my favorite actresses look it.
If enough people tease me 'good-naturedly' about it.
If relatives pinch my plump cheeks hard.
If other people make it my identity.
Tell me how do I stop it from getting under my skin, from building a house inside my head, from making hunger my best friend, from turning food into the enemy.
It takes ample arms to hold a newborn star — this they do not consider; weight to tame the wildest of moons when it tries to send the planets out of balance — this they do not consider; hips wide enough to carry a star on while painting a solar system awake.
This too is a rite of womanhood. You are taught in subtle ways to hate yourself from when you are still a seed. What choice do I have when I am not hiding, but to make this tongue so sharp that everything around me bleeds?
You will know love in the most painful of ways. You are over-sensitive and others will hurt you, because you still haven't learned to harden your heart.
Girlhood is confronting the parts of you that you think are too dark for anyone to love.
How do you look at someone when you feel like a wound made of shame?
I feel like I am shame and sadness and nothing more.
My brother have always been good at recognizing sadness and replacing it with happiness for people before they even realize it.
I am behaving like an injured animal, but I don't know how to stop it.
The ink fades but you can still see traces. Just like the scars that always remain.
A hundred thousand excuses. That is all I see in her message. Not an apology, but a demand for forgiveness.
I should have known that what we bury will always return to haunt us.
