error 1:
see a woman will notice if you love her.
your tells. shifty eyes, the glitching, hesitating body, back and forth, any wrong move. a woman will notice the ridiculously small effort in your eye movement, whether it’s on her, or avoiding her because it secretly loves her, or plastered somewhere else in distraction because it doesn’t love her. none of this which says anything, really. just pointing it out, getting it all out there. that is her first error; the noticing must be carved straight from her skull.
i expose and ridicule us, but that is all very well and good because i recall a conversation i had with a man a few months ago. he said i feel like i know women. internally rolling my eyes i said is that so. he said yes. he said do you feel like you know men? i said i feel like women know themselves and that’s all they need to know. he reared back and got this look in his eye that said damn. i left and he never heard from me again.
one thing about it was i felt sick in my waiting for you all the time. that was the problem. i just wanted to get on with my life. i needed to knife the stagnancy aside. so i took a handful of all that was rotting inside me and i made use of it, and is it any of my business to ask what you did with yours?
i remember how much more beautiful i got and how — well. don’t you feel sad that all this time you’ve stayed the same? that men will either look the same or look worse, their insides still filled with the same nothing? isn’t it an easy existence what you have, with your boys and your lifestyle and your Big Boy Corporate World? and isn’t it an empty one?
perhaps you don’t get the same plundering grief female friendships cause because you’ve never dug the axe of your heart as deep as we. because you have never penetrated anything except those things which guarantee you pleasure and the irony is, you aren’t deep enough. your phantoms rule this false and physical world, yet reaching our levels of joy is unattainable for you because of what you are and what you stand for, and because the key to which you could have everything is always lost to you, forgotten at the bottom of a desk drawer since you never realize a thing until it is missing from your grasp
all i was trying to say to you in my silences was that i could not sleep either, that i am haunted by you. yet you could not bear the sting of the heavy fist that is love. you could not bear what it would mean for your soul, that you would be elevated beyond recognition, that a girl was helping you toward a timeline of love. essentially basically that i would devour you. and i, very happily, won’t deny that. why fold in front of a woman when you know her heart can do what it isn’t supposed to for anyone that isn’t itself? and listen you gave that up, so point to yourself in the mirror. don’t avoid your eye the way you avoided mine.
it is a weighted error to be soft, and yet it is the only way in the long run. i spent years of a good life carrying on my back a steely spine that became too heavy. trying mightily to show i was not to be messed with. knives in my inner thighs i would pull and itch at. aching to use and have it used against me. and what did that do if not prove i was in need of protecting? the thing is, women have, in each and every one of us, been dealt that hand. i am telling you all i do in this wretched life is love, and love
12/5/24
error 2:
i am unsatisfied with this love ploy. how could you care for someone once and be unmoved forever after? how could we walk past one another through the gates of life and you, in all your infamous indifference, look at me as though i was not once what your body went rigid for? how do bodies change from what they once were? are the fates and movements of our bodies not decided? to what parallel world did we shift? how could it just be gone? greater still is the fear that i am not asking the right questions.
how could i, someone who had been sworn deep within her own misery for one person, pass by you and feel the resoluteness in your body, the doneness, and still think to myself: i am glad it is done. i am glad god has plucked us from it. how could i betray what had once been the only, clear lifeline?
it is not that i wish for it back. it is that i just can’t stop thinking about how it could be so powerful one day and completely gone the next, empty, undesired.
isn’t anyone ever sad over a thing that’s lost even if they no longer pine for it? what of the people like us who want to believe there is only one of you out there reserving a one true deepness, holding out for you, who will peel back layers of you even you did not know of? what happens when you’ve used your one chance up, a girl crying wolf? does that love you gave live inside them always? if so could i have it back, and give it to something that will actually bring me joy?
oh this is all a horrible breaking of things
12/15/24
i am:
(twisting this into my own tale. i understand. cursing whatever beast in me that feeds off art. feeds off of closure between jealous girls and reconciling girls. beast in me that wonders during every aftermath, why i didn’t love. bathes in these aftermaths because it’s what you are: a feeler of the falling apart, a lifter of the head to watch wide-eyed and sad like it’s the first snow, a body being put to sleep by angels’ hands. why think it all over? what even is the purpose of anger? a plea to be loved by a thing that hates you? or a thing you hate?)
it is a beastly thing to need things, to be moved all the time. by art. by realizations about ourselves from other women. the girl you were jealous of when you were too young to understand why you were jealous that you now understand very well, is going to grad school in september and the news fills you with a searing, unimaginable pride. look at that — women standing on business. go and do god’s work, is what you thought when you found out. and she is not my daughter. and she is not my friend. and somehow.
look how both of you have grown. into women, at that. grown apart, yes. grown nonetheless. how could a reconciliation so beautiful have waited so long to become? why not from the beginning? was god wearing a nasty little smirk or a soft one? jealousies between women have lasted years. and their reconciliations have taken but moments; 30-second convos in passing on busy campuses. and the book closes once the peace is made. there is no more hardness in your heart for any girl trying just as hard.
oh girls and our stupid errors, where do they come from? growing up, who were our teachers.
i wish i could reach out my hand to her, and what a beast that inclination is. i wish to hand such a feeling to the fireplace. what of those people who can leave unspoken doors hanging wide open? aren’t they happier than me? i want to tell her how proud i am of her, though neither of us have any place in each others’ lives. and so what? how much ownership in her life do i need to simply pass over a kind word? what prevents me from reaching a hand across the universe, across a few blocks of space?
me. women. the ways of women. ugh! enough.
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