Hazel

This entire world was built off of backs like yours, and mine, and all of the women who came before us and it’s time we un-break them. Straighten our spines and sharpen our nails. I want you to know that yes, it is so terribly dark in here and increasingly hard to shake the feeling of being devoured and digested but that cannot mean that we stop shouting, stop clawing up the throat of tyranny until our boots are pressed to its neck.

I want to tell you that sometimes swimming feels a lot like sinking and maybe that’s all it is anyway isn’t it? A continuous fight to keep breathing. I hope you never stop moving forward, even if what’s ahead of you is nothing but darker horizons and stormier skies.

Women have never been afforded the luxury of standing still or simply treading water. Never permitted a seat at the table without moving mountains and crossing oceans to get there. But we have gotten there before and we’ll get there again.

In my dreams, we pull out our chairs together and sit with our shoulders held back. All of us mothers, daughters, nieces, aunts and grandmothers. All of us entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, doctors, politicians, scientists, writers, lawyers, blue collar workers, little girls with big dreams, and everything in between. All of us, women.

But here and now I sit on the floor of my room at the foot of my bed with my knees pulled to my chest in the same way that I did when I was 19, 15, 12 and 7 years old and I remember that I was angry then too.

Nothing will ever feel like home the way that it did back then. There are pieces of you buried in your childhood, things you did not- could not carry with you into adulthood. And you can’t ever go back.

Sometimes I feel the first warm, unsteady breath of spring and I’m staring at the promise of new flowers through the eyes of a pre-teen girl who so easily forgets the bite of winter. Who can’t fathom that there are entire years of frost ahead of her. And I can’t ever go back.

1. I dropped a dead bird on your doorstep and was branded a murderer. I’m sorry that my love looks so much more brutal than yours, I just wanted to offer you something more beautiful than myself.

2. Three months ago, we fought about folk music. You told me I talk about my trauma too much. Said ‘not everything is that deep’ and I thought of all the holes I wanted to dig in my backyard, each one cavernous enough to fit a casket, to bury bones inside them.

3. You call me aggressive and I promise I don’t mean to be. I’m no wolf in sheep’s clothing, but I have been bruised and beaten for years and was only ever labeled as vicious after the first time I snapped at you. Maybe, what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry I’ve bitten you. I don’t know why I can’t stop showing you my teeth.