In these quiet moments, I ponder the existence of curses. The idea of the curse of a woman flies around my mind until I am hunched over sobbing. my belly a thunderstorm and my face an ocean. my mother and I swap stories of trauma, our tears mirrored through our cellphone screens. She recounts her existence in the world as a woman, unheard and misunderstood. The world is so large for a small woman. She built herself a shield of armor and now passes it down to me. I put it on and lay in bed uttering silent prayers to my grandmother. 

 

In these quiet moments, I ponder the distance between the stories of women, despite time, each one is still woven with the same thread creating the same quilt. Is this what it means to be a woman? When did our softness turn into stone?

 

Is this what it means to be beautiful? To walk is to slay a hundred dragons. Having to be your own warrior, to write your own battle plans. Never knowing if the one beside you is a traitor or a protector. I think of Medusa, her eyes so powerful, one stare would turn you to stone. I wish myself her strength. I read between the lines. I make her story mine remembering each word so violently. It is just another way for my body to feel like my body again. I look to her strength and see her story with honor. After all, she is another woman woven into the quilt.

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I wish they had stuck snakes on my head, perpetual body armor. At 19, silenced by sleep, I found myself awake to a body over mine, a ghost mirage hovering over my half-lidded limbo state. Even now I feel the pressure of the bed underneath me, a memory as sharp as lightning it bleeds into the daylight hours. I feel myself sink into the mattress as if I am but a carcass being cut open by hunters as they take their fill of my organs. I find myself lost in the maze of it all wondering if I would make it out. I dreamed myself escape routes, wondering if I ran into the battle head-on I could fight.  I wish myself her snakes. I wish myself protection. Sometimes though I just wish to forget. 

 

To this day, I wonder why words left my body at that moment. I wonder where my strength slipped away. It cocooned itself back into the net of safety. I keep quiet for the first time in my life when I realized there are no words in the entire language that could describe my fear and most of all my anger. The words got caught slipping back down to my throat. It was all I could muster and even that wasn't enough. 

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The day he apologized to me, I finally learned what it was like to stare into the eyes of a predator and make it out alive. The day I saw him sitting in my class, I learned what it was for the world to laugh and turn its back on you. The day he walked into the bar I worked at, I learned what it was like to feel the ground open up but not swallow you whole. It kept me hanging above the crumbling concrete as it dangled my freedom with a snarl. The day I finally woke up without ringing in my eyes, I felt as if I had clawed my way out of the ground. Nails chipped, charred with dirt but it did not matter. I had finally found quiet. 

 

Is this what it means to know trauma as a friend? A house that is always haunted. A ghost that lingers around, and knows you so intimately it could be your lover. Never leaving you but always silent. Most days I feel more prey than hunter. I know the inside of my body because of him. I recut the wounds he left, always staring, staring but never understanding. Watching the color of my blood against the porcelain sink as I slice my body open to feed the spirits of the past. Yet as I hear whispers as the clock strikes the midnight hours when the sky finally darkens. You learn you are never alone. 

 

This is what it means to know that trauma lives on. It passes through generations. It stays in your body for months. Every time you are touched, it resurfaces, and lingers around you, the smoke of the past choking you. My mother retells her trauma to me. Her mother to her. And me to my children, one day. I keep my words pretty in my mouth as I tell others about the men who hurt me. I keep myself silent and pretty so I don't scare them away but I am tired now. I am tired of the men who hunt me for sport. 

 

This feeling lives in our bones. I feel it most when I am loved - as if to remind me why I am loved. It will always be there no matter how many times I will myself to forget.  Nowadays, I feel as if I have conquered the stone pressing on my chest. Most days are good. Some days are bad. It is a ritualistic cycle I have taught myself to break. I have taught myself ways to live with the darkness, to set it by my bedside. To coexist like the moon and the sun. I see it at night, passing by it with a glance but I don't allow myself to linger. Lingering is a thing of the past. I see life through flashing moments. 

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Each man I encounter is another brush with death. Another moment I find myself being swept back into the ocean. The shoreline fades into the horizon as I am being lapped up by the current, by the choppy waves. I swim against it as best I can but I tire easily. I am not youthful as I was before. 

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This is what it means to live as a Woman.