ENGL 378

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Today is his birthday. You dreamt about him last night. Some things aren't fair. You know this by now in your short life. But this seems extra unfair. In your time alive you have learned a few things: 1. [[Don't trust men ]] 2. [[Be aggressive]] 3. [[Fuck men]] 4. [[Keep going]]

They will tell you they love you, they will look into your eyes and brush away the hair from your face, they will learn the little things about you–the way you breathe when you're upset and that all you need to forgive is your favorite foods– They will wrap you in their long, gangly (or perhaps strong and muscular) arms and hold you close and breathe you in They will poke you where it tickles and make you laugh (you hope) until you cry Until tears fall down your face, genuine tears, when you realize it is all [[a lie.]] He's not lying per se–it's not quite like that. He doesn't know he's ruining you, tearing your heart out with every whispered and requested, returned, "I love you." He doesn't get it. He's not quite trying to hurt you but he's not trying to protect you either. He says he will love you and hold your heart but he doesn't understand that hearts can't be held just when he wants them to be. Hearts are forever, for as long as you exist, and he forgets you the second he walks out the door. He'll tell you you're pushing him away but you know it's not like that. It's not like that. You never pushed him away. If anything you wanted him closer. You asked for more, for closeness, and he told you it was too much. He pushed you away. He told you [[your love was suffocating.|suffocation]] Don't trust men.

They (who is they?) say that you can either be a lover or a fighter. You will be both. You will be a lover through fighting and sometimes it will be the other way around. You are brave and powerful and as good, as great (because men seem to love this concept of being great) as any man that ever walked this earth. You are godly. So when anyone, be it your friends or professors or coworkers or bosses, tell you no, you will fight. You will learn to fight in a graceful yet overwhelming way. You will bowl people over with your power. You will loom over them with how intimidating you seem just because you are willing to stand up to them and to fight. Find your cause. Be a champion of it. Do not take no for an answer. Be smart. Be smart–don't threaten people unless you are legally protected, always have [[a lawyer on hand (or be one)|Lawyer]], know what you are talking about better than anyone else in the room. And you will be a fighter for sure. And because of this, because of your committment to justice, you will be a lover of the light.

Fuck men. Not literally, not in any physical capacity (although do so if you wish but that is not what this means). Walk over them the way they walk over you. Use them as stepping stones to reach your goals. Let them be your secretaries and assistants and your chiefs of staff. Let them be the man behind the woman. You are the woman and you will stand above them, with them, among them. Let none of them bring you down. So they broke you and beat you and fucked you over. Build a pyramid out of their corpses and [[rise to the top.]] (maybe [[your father]] is ok)

You will want to give up some days. Some days feel like death. Some days you wake up–like today–and you will see it's his fucking birthday and he's forgotten you. It's his birthday and you remember last year how he told you he smoked a huge joint on his birthday and you were impressed and he subtely invited you over and you made fun of him. You teased him because you liked him. He could tell. That was [[the beginning.]] Some days it'll be the force of everything hitting you at once and you're breathless. You can feel stones tumbling around in your stomach, how cliche and how true. So you don't eat. You think if you don't eat you'll save yourself from whatever sadness is consuming you, maybe if you don't eat you can be pretty enough, maybe it is a punishment. So girl eat. Girl get out of bed. Brush your teeth. Dye your hair. You are worth living for. You are worth taking care of. He was never worth torturing yourself. He, they, them, hurt you. And the people who hurt you are not worth losing yourself. Go to work, eat, and smile baby. Smile baby girl. You are your own baby girl. He didn't ruin you. No. He didn't ruin *you*. He ruined the projection of you, the one you fed him, the one that could possibly be subservient enough to be destroyed by one man.

You baked and cooked for him. You texted him good morning and good night. You planned dates and pictures and dinners and sleepovers (in the most [[innocent]] sense). You asked to meet his friends and tried to learn his work schedule. You always wanted to know how his day was. You bought him teddy bears when you fought. You brought him his favorite food when you picked him up from the airport. You flew to Colorado to meet his family. He called it suffocating. You got more excited to see him every day than he was ever excited for anything in his life. [[He didn't deserve *you*|Fuck men]]

You find law fascinating. Perhaps it's because you break it nearly daily by smoking weed and jaywalking and drinking underage and texting while driving (you realize this is a terrible habit but have extreme trouble quitting). It's a teenage propensity towards reckless behavior that you never indulged before college. You don't quite do it because you assume yourself to be invincible–no no, it's more of an ambivalence to it. You never had a lasting or overpowering urge to hurt yourself but you also know that life sometimes isn't worth living and that is a fact. You push through until it's worth living again. You don't know if the good outweighs the bad in the end, there's no possible way to ever determine that. But you know that you and everyone else are just bouncing between bouts of survival and living. You much prefer [[living|Shelley Jackson]]. You hope to be a lawyer someday. [[You will fight for people|innocent]]. People who need you. And you will kick ass.

When you think about it, about him, you like to think about the beginning. Well, no not exactly like. You loved the beginning. But it makes you feel...something...to think about it. These days when you think about him you often don't know how you feel. You aren't sure if you're angry or sad or heartbroken or The beginning was fun. You threw up at his house the second time you hung out. You drank too much. How embarrassing too because you told him you had a "high tolerance." You thought he'd never want to see you again. You know for a fact you would not want to see any boy who came over to your place, drank your alcohol, and then threw up in your bed. So you were charmed and surprised that things weren't awkward in the morning when you woke up next to him in bed, that he wanted to see you again. Men don't treat women like they deserve. So when you are shown basic decency, you treasure it more than you should. But you also know that he was special. And fuck you hate admitting that. At the beginning things were so good. They always are... You told him you were afraid of a relationship, you were so afraid of dating and fucking things up. But then you just kind of started to want to spend all your time with him. And then you fell in love with him. And then he broke you heart. And you believed it was you that fucked up, like it is every time. [[You won't make these mistakes again.|Don't trust men ]]

Be the best. Be better than them. If you go low, do it in the right way. What's the right way to go low? 1. You only go low when they go low. 2. Always have the law on your side 3. Know when to stop and [[walk away]] 4. You don't give up, you just do it differently

Your father shaped you, shaped your sense of humor, your inability to apologize, your irreverance. For 16 years he had the exclusive rights to the way you processed and dealt with emotion. You were unrelenting in your unapologetic and quick witted nature. You were constantly dishing out quips and jokes at the expense of others. You were disrespectful but oh-so-loveable when you weren't. In recent years, with the help of therapy, you've become much more self aware and corrected what used to be mean behavior. You would not consider yourself nice now (to most people) but you have an overwhelmingly kind heart. You are trying. You don't want to be mean. Just [[aggressive|Be aggressive]] Several months ago your mother asked you why you were so emotionally guarded. You told her that you took your cues from your dad. You think this confused her as she told you that he's not particularly noteable, i.e. many men behave like him. But he's not many or most men. He's your father. And he was the only man for so many years. He was the only man your life. You took your cues from him. You took your cues on how men should treat you, on what emotions should look like. No, for some reason it was not your mother you took your cues from. You grew up to be like your father but you wanted to be like your mother.

It wasn't an intentional lie. Not in the malicious sort of way. He didn't plan to hurt you from the beginning. You know he wasn't devious or scheming. But it was still a lie. A lie is every bit as much a lie even if it is unintentional right? You question how a lie can be unintentional though. It's not as if he accidentally said you could be friends and hang out after it was over. No one forced him to kiss you when you saw him after he came back from his summer back home, that one last goodbye, that hug, that fucking hug that broke your soul. It broke you, every piece of your fucking heart that you were holding together with duct tape and popsicle sticks, it fell apart as he wrapped you in his arms the last time, the very last fucking time. When people ask you why you hate him, why you can't stand to hear his name, you know they are surprised by the fact that he never cheated on you [[(although who can be sure?)]], that he never beat you or [[raped you.]] As if your vitriol over your broken heart is only acceptable if he did something unspeakable. And yet, to you, what he did *is* unspeakable. Unspeakable. So you write about it instead.

You aren't very good at walking away. In fact, you wish you were better. Men seem to have this skill mastered and you wonder why you always seem to stick around with people until they decide to leave. Doesn't it hurt less if you leave first? You assume that if you leave first you've already given up. This is often the hardest part for you. Hope is a fatal thing in a breakup. You have a tendency to hold on to it, even manifest it, to the point that you torture yourself over "what if's" when you already know the "likely's." It's not easier to hold on to hope; no, if anything it's extremely painful and hard. But you seem to be unable to let go when you want to. What makes a person let go? What is the final straw when, even after they're gone, you finally accept it? Walking away would have been less painful. You thought about it a lot that [[last month]] but you didn't know how. You can't walk when you still have hope.

The last month was one of the worst of your life. He left you before he was supposed to leave you. He was never supposed to leave you. But there was an official end. And then there was the beginning of the end. You remember distinctly driving home from the beach and checking to see if he'd texted you yet that day, even though you knew you shouldn't be texting and driving. You had pulled into a rest stop to get gas and since it was New Jersey they filled your tank for you while you checked your phone. And you felt your entire body go cold, numb, with a shock and shiver. His friend died. You didn't completely understand what that meant at the time but something in you knew. You knew. This was the end. He was gone. He didn't want to talk to you. For that entire month, you hardly spoke. And you worried about him, about your relationship, nonstop. You sent him care packages and texted him that you were there for him. Soon you stop texting him because you knew that's what he wanted. You'd just send him a good morning and goodnight, if that. And sometimes he'd respond. Then one day, he disappeared for three days. Just like the last time. [[Just like the last time.|the first]]You wonder if he knew. But you certainly knew. You knew it was really over. And when he came to say it, you weren't surprised. But it still broke your fucking heart.

The similarities between you and Shelley Jackson are striking. Shelley Jackson, that woman your professor had you read. She wrote //Patchwork Girl// and //My Body// right? Hold on. You go and do a quick Google search and you're right. You too grew up with your legs so covered in bruises (hers were covered in scabs) that to see them without them looked foreign. Still, to this day, you find stray bruises painted on your shockingly white legs (so white your mom once asked you if you were wearing white tights). People ask you where they came from and you, with a rush of pride and nostalgia, tell them you have no clue. You never know. These bruises just show up; sometimes they hurt, most of the time they don't, they impress their temporary marks on you, change you, and then leave you. They don't leave your skin in any graceful sort of way, the way paper cuts disappear like they were never there. Bruises fade from purple into a sickly yellow until they match your skin. But you think there is a certain decency in the way they fade from your skin and don't leave you so suddenly. You too played with your gums, your teeth, when the orthodontist would tighten your braces or after you flossed for the first time in too long. You still do it with your Wisdom Teeth. Growing up there was a certain addictive quality to the soreness–it hurt but in a sensual way, in a way that made you want more. It was a soreness that made you think you deserved it. Your friends would jokingly call you masochistic. You still do it now, fiddle around with the sore parts of your mouth–and now that you're teething it's constant–but you don't like the soreness now as an adult. Now you find it hurts too much. You too walk around everywhere barefoot. This was mainly an attribute of your childhood. You never ever liked to wear shoes. You loved how wild it felt. You wanted to be like a Hobbit. Just like Shelley Jackson, you used to walk around on hard rocks and wet grass and hot sand in the hopes that your feet would one day become immune to the harshness of the earth. One time you were in Atlanta visiting your family and you wore heels. Your feet started to hurt on the walk back to the hotel so you took off your shoes and walked back barefoot in the nicest streets of Atlanta. [["I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free..." (-Emily Brontë)|the first]] You begin to realize that most of what you have in common with Shelley Jackson is your ultra specific enjoyment of pain. The ways you liked to test yourself, see how far you could push your limits, see how much pain was too much and how much was just enough to keep you on the edge. You and her have other weird things in common though: you have the same first initial, you don't like other people's feet but can tolerate them, and you rub your feet together under the covers as some kind of happy, comfort dance. But most importantly, you both have told your stories, have created corpuses, bodies, to be shared with the world. Our bodies, our stories, are not ours anymore. They started as ours, and now they are in the indelicate hands of the digital world. Shelley Jackson thinks hands are innocent. You most certainly do not. Shelley says they are forced to carry out the will of their owners. And sometimes they are matched with an evil owner. But a skeleton, she says, is innocent. But you see hands and you can't separate them from the rest of the body. When you draw them it's easy. You can draw a hand and a wrist and connect it to nothing. But in life hands have arms and arms have shoulders. Hands are part of a body. Maybe you feel bad for the whole body of an evil person. You try. But you can't. You don't feel bad for the skeleton of evil. There is evil in the bones of an evil person. Right? There are degrees of evil, this you know. And you want to think that for the most evil people (whomever that is) the evil begins to grow with them, in them at a certain point. When you give this to the world, you only hope their hands aren't evil.

You had your part in this. You know that. It would be unfair to blame everything on him. No no, you're properly fucked enough that you definitely deserve some blame in this. See but why is that you were willing to try and didn't give up when he always walked away the entire year you were together? He told you he felt like he was walking on eggshells around you because if he didn't say the right things in the right way you would get upset. Ok, fair, you can be particular and sensitive and overthink. But at least you let him get upset, you made space for him to fight with you. When you wanted to fight, he was silent. When you wanted to hear what you did wrong he scorned you, he left you, he escaped. And that scared you more than anything else could've. If he was scared and walking on eggshells, you were terrified. You couldn't even be upset around him, you couldn't fight with him. He told you that the two of you fought too much and he couldn't handle it. But in truth you know you only fought because you could never hear each other. It was like two deaf people screaming at each other. You need to fight. It's in your blood. It's not a good or bad thing. We need fighters in this world. You are a fighter. You don't want to fight about everything–far from it. In fact, all of you friendships are incredibly low drama and you have never lost a friend due to a fight. But when something is wrong you need to fight. You saw it as fighting *for* you guys. He saw it as fighting against him. You saw his silence as apathy and indifference. He saw it as deescalation. You know you need a fighter in your life now. [[You want to conquer, to dominate.|rise to the top.]] Batman has always been your favorite superhero. It's because he's not really super. He's just a rich guy who cares. You have been seeing Bat signals everywhere. Gotham needs you.

Who can be sure of what happened? You didn't speak much during that [[last month]]. You wonder if he found solace elsewhere. You woke up today, after having dreamt of him, and it's his birthday. It all seems so cruel. You check his Facebook, a stupid, rookie mistake. And he's posted he's in a new relationship. With a girl from back home. Maybe... Your mind trails off to dark places you wish it wouldn't go. But it does and you can't stop. Who can be sure? You will likely never speak to him again. It's better to not know, you think.

They broke you in a different way. They didn't break your heart. They never had your heart. They took away your agency, your words, your power. And girl you were made of power. You were made in power and born into it. You crave power. Power is a fucking drug, your favorite, more than any of [[the pills you take]] to trick your brain into seeing the world a little pinker. They broke you by taking your power. You drank the feeling of powerlessness away for a year or so. You pretended to be normal, to feel normal. No one could tell right? No one could tell that you were gutted like a fish, you were goddamn empty and didn't feel things the same way anymore, right? No one could tell. And you never told anyone. But you brought your power back to your body, to your soul. You give your spirit and soul life when you feel. You are. You *are*. That is power. Girl you are a power people fear. And you fucking live for it.

Those pills take some of the grit out of the world. You see things just a little rounder, softer. It's not noticeable to you anymore, you've been taking them for so long. But you imagine they make things more bearable, just in a general way. It's an overall effect on life. It doesn't make fighting easier, it doesn't make your heartbreak less acute or painful, it doesn't mean you miss him less. But you see yourself differently now than how you were five years ago. [[Five years ago a boy broke your spirit, not just your heart.|the first]] This time, that didn't happen. You didn't let that happen; the pills didn't let that happen. This time, the blows landed in a way that made you gasp for air but still standing. You were doubled over, winded, tears streaming down your face, but you didn't fall. The pills make everything more bearable you think. They keep you alive.

You have loved //loved// two people in your life. Both of them broke your heart. You loved the first in a way you know you will never love again. You and him were like liquids and just freely mixed, flowed, until you reached an equilibrium where you couldn't tell which parts were you and which parts were you. Who you were before him became a distant, vague thought. You lost and found yourself. You learned how to love, how to give. You lost your individuality, you lost the curves and edges that defined you and distinguished the two of you. You became one. And when he left, you died. Part of you died. That part of you is dead. There is a hope, an idealism, a naivety, a sweetness that was murdered that night. You have come to terms with this. You have never once wanted to be the same person you were during that relationship. You lost yourself in a different with the second. You were so afraid of losing him, you lost yourself. You changed yourself to become someone you are not. You are a fighter. Embrace it. Become it. Love made you chain your lions, your fierceness, the very voice that makes you //you//. You enslaved yourself to love, you watched yourself give up pieces of yourself like a game of chess you were losing You still love him. Sometimes you even miss him, when you don't hate him. But you can never be with him, or any man like him, ever again. He has a special place in your heart (and hell) but you hardly find men attractive now. You are different now. You will never be a slave to love again. You don't need love, not this type. You don't need a man to be happy. It's easy to fall for love when you want it. It's harder when you prioritize yourself and your ambitions. You look in the mirror now, one of the 10X magnifying ones, and your skin looks cracked, broken in every place just under the surface. With your short fingers you trace the cracks. You can't feel them, or see them in the normal mirror. In fact, they're so small and imperceptible you wonder if you're creating things with your mind. You come closer. No, they're definitely there. They don't have any kind of discernible pattern or cause. You never noticed them before. You wonder if anyone else has noticed them. Unlikely, since they're so small and you'd have to get so close to see them. But the thought nags at your mind. You wonder if you look different to the world, if they can tell somehow, that you're cracked.