I spent long hours of my childhood making up fantasies.
pretending to be asleep, so that I can be left alone with my daydreams.
I built different worlds with different versions of me
With different lovers and different families.
In one world, we start out as two strangers on a train.
Both made eye contact but both too nervous to say hello.
There’s only one more stop before I get off,
but you don’t know.
Will I ever see you again?
Our fate is chosen in the second he decides to follow me, stops me, says to me, “hi.
I don’t know who you are but I think I saw your soul in your eyes,
and they look like you may have seen mine.”
In this world I am learning how to turn old lovers into lessons.
In another fantasy, I’m falling in love with a pirate.
I am a locked prisoner of my father’s ship and you’ve promised to do one last crime.
Our secret love burns the sheets at night.
No girl has ever made your stay this long.
Has ever made you yell the ocean’s secrets.
You save her from her storms, from her father, from the dangers of sea.
But that’s the problem-
You see, every story is about how happy she feels when she falls in love.
What the man says to her.
How the man fucks her.
Every story is about the man.
Why can’t it be about her?
Be about how she only writes when she needs to breathe.
How she meditates in the silence of her bathtub.
How she promises to teach her daughter how to grow sunflowers in her back pockets.
How to pleasure herself in a hot shower.
How to be self-sustaining.
How to connect with her feminine energy and call upon Mother Nature for advice on how to stay warm and full and magical all by herself.
Why can’t I save myself?
Why am I waiting for someone to save me?
- by B
Her teeth are like jagged mountains
So don’t tell her her smile looks like the sunset
Her thighs are as wide as rivers
Where a bush stays unkept upstream
When you tell her the arch of her slender back reminds you of valleys
She’ll remind you she was born under a rock
The sun never showed her any love
When she sings she is loud and raspy
So when you tell her that her voice sounds like bluebirds,
She’ll growl at you cause there is nothing singsong about her.
She smiles, And I can see it tug at the corners, almost as if she betrayed her own lips. They can’t see the life leaving her eyes, like i can. a mirror of trapped fears.
“You can rebel,” I tell her, “you don’t have to listen to them.”
“Listen to me,” she says softly, “You, you’ve got a little bit of revolution in your bones. A little bit of rebellion in your hair. All you’ve got to do is shake a little. Bravery radiates from you. It is not that I am afraid, not that I am weak, not that I am small. It is that I am obedient.”
“Disobey,” I plead, “Defy. Dare to fight.”
She smiles. “You are going to move mountains. You’ve got a spirit so wild, wind will be your home. Do not wait for me. I will not come. Fight to free your fate. Fight to free your soul. Fight for all the girls who cannot fight. Run now. Run home.”
“Come with me,” I plead one last time.
She smiles. “Some people were born for war. I am so sorry I was not built a soldier.”
