“Girlhood.” You say kindly.
And I flinch at the lilt in your voice.
A girl knows no kindness.
Waking with thighs drenched in blood,
Head turned down to ignore the sneers of older men,
Tugging a skirt lower over a pair of bruised knees in shame.
Girlhood is many things.
Pink,
Angry,
Mascara,
Confused,
Glittery nails,
Sleepless nights.
It was never kind.
Tugging on the bit of fat around my hips,
Pulling as if the flesh would melt into compliance.
Holding a breath of air in a tight dress with more kindness than I’ve ever held myself.
Counting the numbers on the scale like a boy my age would’ve counted stars.
But a girl’s star is the grief on her shoulders,
The weight of lugging around a personhood that took more than it gave.
“Sit like a girl.” They’d say, as if sitting is how I’d earn my girlhood. As if spreading my legs on a chair, the way my father did, was an invitation— an act of blasphemy.
“Talk like a girl.” They’d say, but their fingers pressed into their lips every time my snarling maw parted. This anger can not rot on the tip of my tongue and yet you ask me to slaughter every curse in my throat, to smile at disrespect for being a girl meant being looked at as more than a hole with legs was a luxury. That a man who could hear the pulse under my flesh over the need between his thighs was a god.
“Walk like a girl.” They’d say, but girls don’t walk, they run— down narrow alleys, desolate streets, the hallways outside their apartments. These legs, that men continue to imagine spread, run for they know not to simply walk.
“Dress like a girl.” They’d say, until they hear a girl’s name on the news— then she becomes a temptress, a slice of meat hung on a hook at a butcher’s stall. Art to interpret. A doll to pose. A thing to fuck. But girl’s are born bare. Wailing and screaming, covered in blood, and with clenched fists— angry as if foretelling the life they must now lead. Girls are not the dresses they wear, they are not the organ between their thighs, they are not their un-spread legs or tight mouths or kind eyes or the number on the scale.
Girls are the anger you breed in them.
The stars they never got to count in the night sky.
The burden of grief on their shoulders.
They are the pain you taught them.
The every curse they had to learn to slaughter in their throats.
“Girlhood.” I spit back at you with anger. Anger I was supposed to kill in my throat.