…why does it feel like she could eat the world?
She has had to learn to make herself delectable. Not fully a woman, but with all the illusion and perfume behind the fog machine of femininity. She exits the bathroom through a plume of powder and steps onto the tightrope. She’s rouged in plummy purples and peachy pinks, glazed in silky glitters and juicy gels. She has a higher education in pretending she likes all the things you like. An expert at pouring her personality into a silicone mold and letting it set overnight, just how you like it. She tucks away the parts of herself you might find challenging; hides them behind the button in her high-waisted jeans.
She makes herself smell like cookies. She tells herself she has to shave her body all over so she’s smooth and shiny like marble. Sometimes she feels that looking perfect for a boy is more about survival than seduction. Heaven forbid you see her armpit hair. Or worse, the hair on her upper lip—OH! THE HORROR. Maybe her body hair disgusts you because it reveals she has opinions—and opinions would make her “difficult.” Less manageable.
When she was little, in the throes of a temper tantrum, bellowing in anger for the world to hear, her dad told her girls don’t get angry. That it’s not pretty. That it’s not lady-like. That it’s not serious, true anger—like her brother’s. Or like his. So then why does it feel like she could eat the world?
In womanhood, instead of eating the world, she eats a pill at the same time everyday so you don’t have to worry about becoming a father and so she doesn’t have to worry about becoming a single mother, or about getting an abortion. But mainly, it’s because it’s you who coos: “I don’t like condoms,” like it’s cute. So, her body is automatically volunteered as tribute, and over time, a steady hormonal feed fills her breasts with lumps and her brain with chaos. It’s her with the annual date at her gyno’s office. It’s her feet up on cold metal stirrups. It’s her cervix being scraped and prodded. It’s her waiting for lab results.
The artificial butter on the popcorn is this: she’s taught it’s her who has to keep you. You: the one who won’t shower for hours after going to the gym. You: the one who doesn’t use lotion (apart from the sad one on your nightstand). You: who has no skin care routine and saves hundreds and hundreds of dollars not buying beauty products. You: who has never owned a curling iron (or burned yourself on one). You: who can let all of your hair grow freely. You: whose body doesn’t get worshipped, shamed, sexualized, and degraded in the same breath. You: who feels entitled to the bodies of other people’s daughters—this legion of young women being yelled at to close their legs and open them at the same time; who stumble into their 20s dizzy with cognitive dissonance.
She is a one-woman show in the bedroom, playing all the different women from pornhub-dot-com who live rent-free in your head. She pretends she’s “into that stuff.” She tells herself to treat sex casually or she’ll become a casualty who’s written off as “clingy,” who’s demonized as some hostage-taker trying to tie you down and suffocate you. Meanwhile, it’s her who can’t breathe well as she watches you back away. It’s you who becomes more and more see-through. It’s you who vanishes through the wall like an apparition. You see, her track record is haunted being so full of ghosts.
She gets exhausted using all her muscles to walk the tightrope. The smell of her perfume gets nauseating. Her shoes make it hard to balance her hormone-riddled body. The concealer and mascara around her eyes congeal into a grey goo. Her vision gets blurry. The underwire of her bra is breaking tiny blood vessels around her ribs. She gets this awful sense that there is no end to the tightrope up ahead. Walking it so long, it seems she’s been duped. She starts to feel like a toy that’s lost its shine. Time and again she is placed on the top shelf like an old trophy, gleaming and glinting through the dust. And when she looks at the bottoms of her feet, she can see all the boys’ names there, written sloppily in black sharpie.
She takes herself out of rotation.
She lets her hair grow—all of it.
She remembers what she used to like to do when she was little. What she liked before boys became her sun and her dreams were sent to live on the moon—never full for long, always waxing and waning from focus.
She remembers how to say her name in her own voice. One in a lower register than the high-pitched note she’s been screeching for so long. The texture of it becomes richer and more grounded with gravel. Then, women on the earth below start to hear her on the tightrope, high up overhead. Wiser women who speak in the same tone as she does now. Wiser women who were once tightrope-walkers themselves. Wiser women who also used to have names written on the bottoms of their feet, names faded and worn now. Following this newfound voice, they float up alongside her, take hold of each hand, walk her off the tightrope and down out of the clouds.
With her sore feet on the grass at last, the earth pulls all the wreckage out of her. The names start to fade. She stops eating pills and her ovaries balance themselves out and the lumps in her breasts stop growing and her brain gets turned right-side up. Her skin is scrubbed clean by the hands of the wiser women and a shock of cold air hurtles into her lungs.
With her eyes clear and sharp, she watches the tightrope high above her head and listens for other voices that sound like hers. She becomes one of the wiser women. She has a trained ear now.
And even higher up, she can hear the moon and the sun switch roles, as her dreams take their rightful place in the center.
