HOW DO YOU OWN YOUR BODY
LIKE A COMEBACK THAT COMES TO YOU AFTERWARDS, LIKE THE SUPREME KNOWLEDGE OF KNOWING JUSTICE AND WHEN YOU'VE BEEN WRONGED, SOMETIMES IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE THE LAST SAY. IT'S NOT EVEN ALWAYS ABOUT HAVING THE FINAL WORD. IT'S ABOUT YOUR WORD BEING FINAL, HEARD, UNDERSTOOD. EVEN IF IT'S ONLY HEARD BY YOU.
byAILSA FINERON
I DO NOT WANT YOU
TO REPLY TO THIS
I do not want you to reply to this. I do not even want you to think about replying to this until you have understood it. Read, swallowed, understood and felt it.
I want to rip you from inside of me –don't care what else of me I lose. Then more anger rolls in as thunder because it shouldn't be me who's hurting. I want you to feel the terror. I want you to feel the terror. Feel the tremor of a heart that has only ever been taught to give. Want you to feel what it is to keep on pulling air into ragged lungs. Lungs punctured from snagging on too many claws wrapped around your body. Lungs that were once bright balloons made only for lifting smiles higher. Lungs that are now enemies as you breathe in and lose the oxygen you need for living. Escaping. You are escaping. I am the one trapped beneath you. You are dancing on my body but I am not yet dead.
You have made a mistake. You have made a mistake and it is that –a mistake. In many ways it was not your fault. You who have been raised oblivious. Whose upbringing shows in your overspill of flesh and hot clouds of words. Whose unearned confidence seeps as oil from the cracks of boundaries you were never made aware of. But I am hurt. And this was the wrong mistake to make. You talk of feminism and love and humanity as if you know what those words mean. You blunder through life because you have always been allowed to. And I told you. Clearly. When you puppeteered your body across your colonialist lines and into mine. You claimed to listen, as all of you claim to listen. And now I am here, small and seething. A nest of snakes –the poison child of Midas and Medusa. You showed me your ears but it seems that I will have to be the one to split open your skull. To take my axe and cleave down your parting, take each half of your brain is my right and left hands and spit on them. And then turn them to gold and stone. Take the diamond rings used to bind so many of my kind and etch into the surface of you what you have done. Use these trophies as paperweights to hold down your skin as I scratch poetry with sharpened nails across the canvas that once held your spilling guts in.
But I will not make you bleed. Blood is mine. Red is mine. You do not know feeling.
And I will not make you cry because salt water is mine. The oceans are mine to swim in. Mine to drown you in. I want you to take gulps of me as I hold you under. Look into my kind, smiling eyes as I push you down. I am more vast than you will ever be able to see. Your irises are glazed with sugar which I will lick off with my rough cat’s tongue. Sand paper. Take all the broken pieces of me from my depths and scour off your skin until you are pink and screaming. Pluck each of your hairs one by one with gloating fingers to stitch a notebook from your scalp. Feed your organs to my friends as we feast on your destruction keeping your beating heart for last. Maybe then you will give back something in this world.
And I know that this is not your fault. But I am entitled to anger, to rage. Though it was never shown to me. Only laid upon me. I have had to teach myself the ways of whetting my teeth against stones to enable my snarl; of hiding silver blades in lace and holding throats closed with my shining hair.
And I want to believe that you will learn. You said that you will. You said that you were as you grasped once again at a body that was never yours or anyone’s but mine. And so I cut off your hands. Will you learn before I have to take your arms too? I do not think so. So I am writing this for your own good.
You will never know the pressure of trying to grow up in a society that constantly pushes you back down. Of trying to be everything people want you to be when all those things are pushing you from all sides until you are compressed to nothing but a perfect, compact cube and even that isn’t good enough for them.
You will never know the fear of another body above yours -bigger, heavier. Of another person above your person -bigger heavier, with the weight of society behind them. The momentum of a lifetime of entitlement pushing them down on you until you can’t breathe. In. Or. Out.
I have been chewing the inside of my mouth for days now. Words unformed and endlessly sharp with energy carelessly cutting away at my throat, stomach, skull and tongue. But I am choosing to remain soft. Refusing to grow another layer of scar tissue. We cannot move forwards if we refuse to feel. This hurt will stop with me. So instead I will write this even though it will never contain all those words that I never learned the language for. Maybe I will send it to you. In spite of its insufficiency. Because I know that even with all the tongues in the world I could not express this adequately. I will never be able to give you my experience skewered on a knife for you to take into yourself wholly.
Maybe I will send this to you. But if I do, I do not want you to reply. Because you will never understand.