closerbyfar:

i had a dream last night that i was running down the crumbling steps of an abandoned subway station, and in blue graffiti on the flat gray walls were a thousand of your poems, and in the dream, at least, some of them were for me.

the sun was going down. i was late for a wedding, or a funeral- i didn’t know which- and a stern man in a slim black suit was shouting down at me from the street, “hurry! no one’s going to wait for you, and you don’t know the address.” but i kept leaving things on the marble benches of the platform, my coat or my heels or my notebook, and running back down to get them, and when i did, i’d find myself reading the walls again.

some of the poems i knew and some of them i didn’t. in the fading light they rearranged themselves into new shapes, in your slender slanting hand, and on the steps were things like “whales sing because / they remember the future,” and “is the bed on fire?,” and “dear jess: i couldn’t stop thinking of you.”

back above ground: my best friend walking, windswept, across a nearly-empty parking lot. he looks at me and says “i waited, but i guess i don’t know the address, either.” i tell him i want to talk about memory but he interrupts, says he tried to take my picture, but i don’t show up on camera. he says it’s because i’m such a coward that even my shadow wouldn’t stay with him. and i want to argue, or hug him, or cry, except you’re there, suddenly, leaning on the tailgate of my ex-girlfriend’s subaru, and you are smoking a cigarette and fiddling with your glasses and smiling.

“how does it feel?” i asked. “being dead, i mean.”

you shrugged. “your guess is as good as mine.”

“is it at all like being a flower?”

you laughed. “sure, but quieter, and less wet.”

hungry-skin-vacant-meat:

froelich:

there’s this moment of awareness for a girl when she realizes her legs (and/or arms, armpits, upper lip…) are unacceptable.

she’s just minding her own business, bopping along, when maybe a classmate starts mocking her for having visible body hair. or she goes to a sleepover and someone points out that her legs look different from all the other girls’. or she walks in on her mom shaving and asks why, and the answer is “because a woman’s body looks nicer this way.” or maybe her mother or sister actually approaches her and says, “looks like it’s time you learned to shave that jungle.”

the point is, the day before that realization, however it happened, the girl didn’t give a shit about her hair. she put on shorts and tank tops without a second thought. she didn’t feel unclean. she didn’t feel like a monster when she looked in the mirror (at least not because of body hair). her hair didn’t stop her from riding a bike or climbing a tree.

only after someone draws her attention to it does she start feeling self-conscious and wanting to remove it. removal, in this culture, is never a choice made free of coercion. it’s never born of a girl’s own naturally occurring desires. the seed of shame was planted in her by someone else (family, friends, bullies, magazines, razor commercials) and chances are that seed will stay with her forever- a sinking realization that her body can be wrong, that she can look ugly or dirty even when clean, that a thing she never even noticed about herself before should be a source of retroactive humiliation.

that feeling is like a scar. every time we look at it, the humiliation and judgment we experienced as kids comes rushing back and the little nasty patriarchal voice in our heads (the same one that says shit like “jesus you’re getting fat,” “ugh why did you think you could pull off this outfit,” “god who would ever want to touch THOSE boobs,” etc) says “ugh, looks like it’s time I shaved that jungle.” and it’s just parroting back what we’ve already been told.

whoa, this is so on point holy fuck

This is so accurate, I still remember when this happened to me.

It was girls at my high school, talking about waxing their legs. This girl has just waxed the day before and she was complaining about how she wished she could wax them again, how the tiny amount of stubble on her legs was “disgusting”. I’ll never forget looking down at my own hairy legs and wearing tracksuit pants every sports lesson for the next week in shame. Shame that I never ever felt before that. Shame about my natural body.

My mum seemed overjoyed when I asked her about shaving. I had never noticed another girl’s legs before, but my friends immediately commented on mine. I’ve shaved them ever since.

rvancoogler:

amy: “i do what i want” 

my mind autocompleting cardi b lyrics even though the context is totally incorrect: –AINT NO LIMIT, I SAY WHAT I WANT, I AINT NEVER BEEN TIMID, ONLY REAL SHIT GETS OUT MY MOUTH AND ONLY REAL MEN GO IN IT, LEAVE HIS TEXTS ON READ, LEAVE HIS BALLS ON BL–