negative space

Sometimes my body doesn’t feel like my own. 

I come from my mother, who came from her mother. An endless cycle of matriarchy that all leads back to the Earth. To each sugar maple leaf  and every drop of early morning dew. Sometimes when I am alone at night, right before the sound of cars outside of my window lull me to sleep, I pretend that I was born as Aphrodite was. From seafoam and blood. Naked and glimmering, gliding into the world in an oyster's shell- me, its pearl. My skin still bears the touch of men who hurt me. Their fingerprints cobweb over my epidermis until I am nothing but the mark of their flesh against my own. Proof that I am not virginal and pure. I used to have my father’s last name, bore it like a cross. Carried it around until it made my back ache and bleed, the splinters will probably keep appearing forever. When I told him I was changing my last name,  he was angry. Said that this was proof that I was his. Said that it was pointless for me to change my last name because I am a “girl”. 

A “girl” who would become a “woman” and then marry a man and therefore belong to that man. Said that I would have my husband’s last name anyway. So, how is my body my own when my name has never belonged to me? From the minute I was decided by my parents and the doctors to be a girl, there was the expectation that one day eventually I would be a daughter then a wife. How could I have time to belong to myself? When the transaction of my last name will detach me from a father to a husband and until that moment I am expected to listen and obey and nod my head up and down like  a marionette so that I can be loved by either of these men.