an open letter to the girls who got me through it all
I once read something that said “we were just girls together”, a wholesome bit for those who grew up normal. It was soft. Nostalgic.
The kind of girlhood we didn’t get. Girlhood in the ghetto is different. We didn’t grow up normal. We were just girls together. We used to flirt with danger when the boys got boring.
We wore strawberry gloss and cuss words on our lips every weekend. Clipped our nails like claws and called it protection. The corner store knew our names, but not our stories. The school counselors knew our stories but never said our names. And that’s how we liked it, or so we thought.
We dated boys with bruised knuckles, absent fathers, and moms who chain-smoked Newports on porches with missing steps.
We were the girls who said “don’t fall in love with me” and meant it, But kissed slowly anyway.
Mornings were for flat irons and last night’s Amber Romance. We brushed our teeth with Listerine Strips and stretched five dollars across three days. We ate chips and Faygo for breakfast, like queens in exile.
We walked everywhere, even when we had nowhere to go. Traipsing rotting catwalks and forgotten alleys. Just to be out. Just to feel real. Just to pass time, when life started feeling like it was some tasteless Bubble Yum we’d chewed too long.
We threw up spiked slurpees behind smoky garages, carved our initials into splintered picnic tables we should have never been invited to sit at, next to men who should've never asked for our numbers. Tried to make something permanent before the world taught us just exactly how nothing ever stays.
Our moms were tired. Our moms were beautiful. Our moms were sad in the kind of way no one ever warned us we’d inherit. They yelled when they were scared, and we mistook it for anger, for hate, until we did the same thing to our daughters, our sons.
Our dads were more like calloused hand rumors, or fleeting memories. Not offering much more than voicemails we stopped checking. Mine left before I had words for leaving, Came back, and left again. By the time I realized daughters need fathers, I’d already taught myself to stop waiting for the phone to ring.
We kissed brown bottles, blunts, and black and milds like they could replace what our fathers left missing. Tilted our heads back like sinners in prayer, mouths open to anything that felt like escape. We got drunk on party store vodka and cheap affection, and called it love, because no one ever told us better. Because love only comes hard in the hood. We lived like stray dogs in abandoned malls. Like we were the only people in the world who understood each other, and maybe we were.
We got high just to feel level. Fought with our family like it was a sport. Forgave things we shouldn’t, Just because we didn’t want to sleep alone. Some nights we passed around secrets like joints, but most nights we passed around joints like secrets, burned down to the fingers and still trying to get one last hit.
Nobody raised us right. So we raised each other wrong, but at least we had eachother. At least we had someone to help hold the bucket when the rain started falling through the ceiling.
If you asked us how we survived, we’d lie. We’d smile. We’d say “the good ol’ days”, and hope you’d never find out what it actually was. And now, even now, with clean sheets, and cabinets that close right; with lovers who don’t slam doors or drown themselves in liquor, some nights we still miss what we had back then. Not the pain, not the neglect, but the girls. The girls who stuck around, even when they had nothing left to give.
We were just girls together, and I can only hope You are one hell of a woman now.
Love you forever. For you; Mary, Jaymie, Paris, and Carissa.
