Carnival: Snapshot of My Life as Aileen Wuornos
I long for a world where little girls learn about the bodies of boys and of men when they are old enough to comprehend. When it’s educational — not in the traumatic way — and may even a little magic grows along paths where romance blooms, should it bloom, years removed from baby days, consenting and matured.
I long for a world where intimacy is not synonymous with pain, where pain is not synonymous with love, where pain is not synonymous with “It’s only because he loves you.” I long for a world where women can enjoy the brisk of the night, without a weapon or escape plan in sight, just her and the calm and quiet of a living night filled with sights home only to the world outside her bedroom door.
Bedroom windows are never all that secure, anyway, are they? Not for girls and women looking to get out, no, for boys and men looking to get in. Mother says it’s not her business, no. Listen closely and you’ll hear as the onus of responsibility quietly falls onto the backs of another generation of girls. Little girl one day, little slut the next, the difference not of choice, but of consequence-free circumstance. Boys will be boys and I cry myself to sleep in the bathtub and wonder why I’m bleeding.
There’s a type of hunger only poverty knows. The kind that has your stomach empty for days, bills becoming the boogeyman, and all of a sudden those creepy messages in your DMs start looking like a means to an end. You’re so beautiful, baby. I know I’m old enough to be your father, but I’ll be real good to you. You know that, right? I know I’m old enough to be your grandfather, but you’re so beautiful. You haven’t eaten in days? That must be tough, what a tough little girl. How about you show daddy your tits and maybe you’ll get dinner tonight.
I long for a world where living is not synonymous with never ending healing, where victims are not held to account for the actions of another, where we can go somewhere — anywhere — without checking the car, looking over our shoulders, and keeping an exit in sight. The looming threat of rape and murder is never ending, too. I swallow my morning antidepressant and wonder if it’s now light enough to walk my dogs.
I long for a world where the privileged understand the plasticity of circumstance. How so much of surviving trauma isn’t choice, isn’t innate, it’s forcibly squeezed out like a bruised piece of fruit to a bladed blender. I long for a world where the message itself is more shocking than the messengers who dare utter it. I long for a world where women are allowed to be human. Experience anger without forever being labeled angry, experience aging without our worth fading faster than our collagen. Where we live, as the boys always have: light as the wind, free.
