230521 - Young
Girls who are stronger than me:
0.) My seven-year-old self.
This is 2015. You receive a nice book for Hanukkah: a satirical Bible. From then till the end of the dusky year, you read the whole thing front-to-back. Sardonic meanings lost on you, the book is your moral guide. After this, you will read the entire Bible.
1.) My ten-year-old self.
This is maybe 2019. When I say now that it is the memory I still can't quite decipher, I remember it was you who lived that day. You who survived, and I who didn't. Sometimes I think that ten-year-old girls must be the strongest ones in the world. What I can recall is sensation you felt, the unholy touch of violation. Words may always hurt me, and words will always deconstruct you. I remember being tired, so tired. It was hot outside, but as you walked home from the bus stop, your tears were like the warm comfort of being alive. I mean, no one told you that it was like that; one encounter bringing years of unsourced paranoia. You were never pushed into the ground or thrown against a wall. The ghost of rape still haunts me.
2.) My eleven-year-old self.
Bravery with a double dose of naïveté, you felt like you ruled your monsters and brought down the suns that gods lounge on. I don't know why you thought it was a good idea to bring a copy of that book series back from the library and put it on your bookshelf, as if it were a medal. You had to do it, I suppose. We all must do what we must do to uphold the natural way of things.
You lived a comfortable, happy life, and you uprooted it. You destroyed it, you bit on the fraying threads of your relationship with your mother. You unearthed truths of conditional love, of rage-filled screaming, of condemnations to hell. I am condemned. You are condemned. I'll hold your hand in hell.