Still the girl

This week three men wanted me. My year turned on the hinge of their desire.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

My answer, three times.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl on the beach with thighs twelve years too large, flesh bulging against the chicken-wire gaze of her father and uncle? My bicycle dubbed the gate to acceptability, to shrinking those meaty fillets down to a size that might make me invisible to scorn.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl, fifteen with billboard breasts proclaiming the ripeness of my sex to every man that passed. Before I had learned how to open the long library vault of my mouth. How everyone in a foreign country thought I was my father's wife, in that daisy dress made for a church I no longer believed in?

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl in the warehouse, far from home. Seventeen so green, not a colour a person should ever be. His twice-my-age fingers moved like vine tendrils, brushing my waist, tucking in the tag of my shirt. Into my body a tree trunk, like my sapling self had always belonged to him. Curled in my grandmother's shower with shame.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I am still the girl, twenty-one and never kissed. The first time, my teeth were bars and I did not want to unlock them. His kisses tasted like ash and held a key to the library he would never enter.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl twenty and eight, when moan was just a word and pleasure an idea. Whose virginity became a trophy she was tired of carrying, fox-weary of the steeplechase, the sniffing hounds. So threw it to a pale-fleshed creature who did not understand how twinned desire and fear can be.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl whose no turned limp, fell like a body in a waterfall when he pushed and pushed again. Drowned when he said it was my fault. Two years gone and I'm breathing again but the timber of my belly is still waterlogged.

I am not for you.

Don't they know, I'm still the girl with a canyon named father in her chest? With a trickle, a creek called love in that chasm signed man. With a bear in the belly of that canyon. She roars at all the strangers stumbling in. There is no haven in this body, this tree trunk is not home.

I am not for you.

To the men that wanted me this week, and the ones that are waiting for me next week and the ones after that.

You can't fill in my canyons with the soil of your masculinity. There isn't enough of you to make it solid ground again. Didn't anyone teach you how earthquakes work?

When it rains, sometimes the creek floods. Sometimes the canyon is full and love washes the stone ledges clean. There are always traces of earth left behind. Maybe we can plant a garden in the crevices together, grow something that hasn't been here before.

You can't fuck my history out of me, can't rescue me from fires that razed long before you arrived. I have not been waiting safe in a tower for you and your steed. I have not been waiting. I have not been safe.

Forests always grow back after fires.

We can't dance if you are always stepping forward. If you move in the only place I can breathe is away. Don't chase me into the canyon.

I am still the girl that dances on the Sabbath day. Dances at midnight. Twirls in her skirts and howls at the sickle moon.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

If I am for you, remember the girl. Learn her too. I am the bear and the canyon and the flood and still the girl.

Unrequited oceans

Love is a compulsion for collision. An unavoidable drive to meet, to crash into an other. To press lives and mouths and yearnings together until it cracks us open. Because sometimes it's the only way to get it out, to cope with the swell of the oceans inside us.

This is love, for me, perhaps just for today. (Mixed metaphors because one will never do for this). I won't always think so. It's not all I think. But I am cracked open and I'm afraid it's for the wrong person, again. I made the choice. I just need to understand it.

Tonight I was driving in the rain and my face started to match my windscreen: streaked with rivulets of wet. I drove until there was somewhere quiet to stop and then I curled against the steering wheel and heaved with the ocean in me.

I grieve not for a loss, but for the love I've never had. For needing these minor collisions to recognise the vastness of myself. For having to be cracked open before I realise that it is unrequited. That the swell coming back the other way is not from a meeting with another ocean but my own waves bouncing off a wall.

The rest of the story

Direct link to video

This.

Remembering all the other ways there are to tell the story of my life.  More than the stories I was born into, the words I have gathered about me like garments. Behind the grief and wanting to howl at the moon: the rest of the story lies waiting to be told. The strength of women, their straight backs.  The sheer joy of living, the pleasure of sating the senses.  All the fierce, deep love.  So much that it spills over sometimes, even if it comes out in the wrong language. 

A kind of relief blooming in my chest.  An unfurling, breathing easier.  Everything will be okay.  Happiness is not beyond me.

The time it takes to remember

Some people that I love have told me they want less of me in their lives. That I am heavy, holding them back from the dazzling lives they could be leading.  I feel weighted with grief, with slow recovering, with trying to remember and forget. It is the same grief of all women who bear the pain of witnessing.  How can I be buoyant and sparkling when I know too much?

I am afraid that I don't know how to love. Not the dailiness, the living of it, the trust in it.  I can feel it: can crave it, yearn lavishly, give it all my attention.  I am too quick to affection for people I do not yet know, and for those I know too well.  When I leave, when relationships end, I feel no different.  After the hurting and grieving and raging and forgiving, I still feel drawn to them as if by gravity.  I can only stay away by putting distance between us, removing them from my life. I am as helpless as the moon; circling, never touching.

I fear I am guilty of holding onto anger, of nursing my wounds in its heat, for fear that without it the world will be utterly cold, and I will be bereft.  I shield myself with my words and my names for wrongdoings, but I don't know what their opposite is.  I don't know what it means to be loved and unhurt.

How long does it take to recover? How long do we allow people to heal?  It has been 17 years since I first realised that the world is not safe for women and children, not even in their homes.  12 years since I left home and tried to learn the nature of the world for myself.  7 years since I left the haven of university to turn my history into the futures of others; trying to save the world since I could not save myself.

5 years since we got away from my father. Even now he still reaches, grasping, into our dreams, our relationships, cutting us apart.  3 and a 1/2 years since I learned for the first time what it means to be actually relaxed in my own home, to not be constantly waiting for the sound of that car in the driveway; waiting for the cold shoulder to turn back towards me; for the next rage over something I had forgotten.

2 years since I realised, through the ultimate act of intimacy, that I have never been loved by a man. 18 months since my brother left us in a towering rage, only to turn back to the father we tried to save him from.  4 months since I wept uncontrollably, curled tightly on my couch, for learning what a child can be like untouched by the hand of human evil.

How long does it take to recover?  Only the time it takes to remember.  And I have forgotten so much.

Bleed

To be a survivor–first you must bleed. You bleed all that was inside of you: the pain, the memories, the fear, the wounds fusing together, the ties to what was in, all its forms. You bleed not once but several times. And when you are empty, you either fade into a shadow or find the strength, and courage to live. When you stand up again, you are for a time, hollow–empty, like a bottle of beer lying on the street, cracked and reeking of its bitter contents. Then you fill yourself up with the new, your recreate yourself–you reform. You don’t have the same heart or mind. The way you see the world is forever changed. 


Lynn Mari via The Last Straw

Uncrowning

Last year I lost ten kilos, grew my hair and started dating. This year I've sworn off dating, gained ten kilos and cut my hair. Several times.

If hair is a woman's crowning glory, what does it mean when it's gone? Is she less a woman, not feminine, making a statement, seeking change? Is she suddenly edgier, more interesting, sexier, less soft?

Hair and grief have a long history together. I only have to look around to find it. This week I learned that my aunt's new partner shaved off his facial hair after 30 years... and a divorce. I have made an art of cutting mine off. If l look back at my many haircuts, I can find a heartbreak - small or large - to match most.

The body of a tree records everything that happens to it, lays down history in the rings of its trunk. Seasons of growth, debilitating droughts, lush summers. A wound in the trunk of a tree will leave evidence, even if it's only a ripple in one year's archive.

Our hair does the same, showing the history of our bodies, our health or unwellness. Wouldn't it include our emotions, our memories too? It might explain why so many turn to scissors after ending relationships, a death, giving up a way of life. Declaring ourselves fit for a fresh start and unburdened by the past. Revealing that we have a past worth cutting off.

a week of wordlessness

1. view from my room

2. looking up

3. icon in coffee

4. direction

5. a sky for my mood

6. into the glare

July changes everything and nothing

silence sits in the house by the bay

some are sleeping

some are woken

where rage has invaded our dreams

when we wake we can only speak of

uncertain rest, the morning fog in our

heads, where we have been and will

go, silent beyond the inferno

we will gather to pay tribute
to unspeakable love

and shy away from crimes

committed in its name

where the cry of a bird meets

the silence of a grave

we will stand on the edge

waiting to crumble, or to burn