I’m a crinkle-leaf girl who has learned to go outside when things aren’t going well. I’m a space cadet who suddenly remembers to be productive / tie things up in a bow / make something of these minutes. Quickly now, because you already lost a few looking at the brown cottonwood leaves above your parents’ house.
I’m a girl who slips into forgetting as a form of pleasure and quietude. The saving of me from you and me from myself. I’m a girl who has a small purple voice inside her who is named Nancy and she is curly-haired and ferociously jealous. I met her when my roommate told me to try to speak to the different feelings inside of me, to welcome them to sit beside me and hear what they had to say. Nancy told and taught me a lot, but she is not who is taking up my time-space-life right now.
It's him. He's inside, though more subtle and harder to spot, a male (chiseled, tall, brown hair, overly privileged, and cruel) who is constantly gazing at me, through me.
He doesn’t have a name, just a pronoun. He’s inside of me, and so while he doesn’t know what I look like, he knows what it feels like to be looked at, and he parades around in this feeling all day long. Right now, he is telling me to find a reflection somewhere so I can fuss over what it is that I am looking like. So that I can splash around in shame and disappointment, this thought-battering of my face and my hair and my body when I turn to the side. He is there, saying more, more, more to the thoughts and the wishes and the screams.
He is the voice that follows my own / just a split-second behind, saying “ew” and “oh” to my belly. He is the reason why I can’t wear tight with tight and why sleeveless is scary. He is the toppling of my day when I eat ice cream in the afternoon, he is the make-believe weight and the spokesperson of the thinner person I will never be. He is the hiding, the not-ness, of all that I am.
There are eyes inside my eyes. You know how the world is projected onto the retina upside down and then our lens flips it? Remember learning that in seventh-grade science class?
Except this time, the world is really right side up and my male voice, he flips it. He tells me I cannot be here—present, content— if I don’t know what I look like, and if that looking is not beautiful.
I haven’t yet found my lens to flip it back.
Prompts and thoughts:
Write without concern for convention. Read some of Jenny Slate's Little Weirds to get some ideas.
Who are some of the people in side of you?
Can you allow them to sit beside you and tell you why they're here?