efflorescent

In this day and age, you have to stick up for yourself and what you believe in. If you don’t, you’ll be buried. Don’t ever get buried, darling.

You are nothing like your mother and other lies you tell yourself

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.”

that’s the way it was, you know? we’d lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and say, “if i go in tomorrow i will kill myself” and mean it all the way and then when the morning came, we’d get out of bed and sling backpacks over our shoulders. maybe that’s the reason everyone thought we were faking it: because we were so damn awful at going through with it. god, how many of my friends ended up underground. humans remember pain in odd ways. i know when you died i clutched my chest and howled for hours. it still hurts, but not as bad as it used to. i always think, “i’ve lived through this enough times that i’ll be alright the next time,” but i don’t think we ever really learn how to be alright at all. and you hurt and you wake up and you remember the pain from last night in an odd way and you say to yourself, well, okay, i can handle today, it’s a wound but it’s healing. and then at night you say, no more of this ever again. and the cycle starts over again. god, but did i live for the weekends. what a waste of life that is: hating five out of seven days. what were they even supposed to be teaching us, because all i learned is that you can be bone-crushingly tired and so sad that the smallest things make you cry and you will still be able to put both feet on the floor the next day. i guess it taught me i could survive anything, but it wasn’t a lesson i think they kept in the curriculum. were we supposed to be so young and already know so much about sorrow? god, these quiet mornings. i hate remembering. i hate being.

A woman who says “No thanks, I’ll sleep on the floor”; a woman who freezes up and tenses at your touch; a woman who says “I really don’t want to” and “We really shouldn’t” and “We can’t” and “Please at least wear a condom” is not saying yes to you, and if you would like to pretend that that is unclear, you are a liar, you are being disingenuous, you are lying and you know it.