You didn’t love her. You just didn’t want to be alone. Or maybe, maybe she was good for your ego. Or maybe she made you feel better about your miserable life, but you didn’t love her, because you don’t destroy the person that you love.
“Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, reforms in the law. If someone says, ‘Oh, I’m not a feminist’, I ask, ‘Why? What’s your problem?’”
-Dale Spender, Man Made Language
We lit our cigarettes off of each other’s. We were never meant to be, no. We had sex, but I could never let her touch me. She couldn’t have extracted my soul from all the places it was hiding. That’s okay. We were what we were, when we needed it.
She was out on my balcony, late one night. I was in the kitchen, when I sensed a change in energy. I walked out onto the balcony to find her sitting with a cigarette in her fingers, trembling with tears streaming down her cheeks.
I sat down in front of her, and said gently, “Come here, sweetheart.” She slid into my lap, and sobbed into my shoulder. I remember the exact feeling of her back beneath my fingertips, as I ran my fingers up and down her spine. My god, I held her, and for the first time in so long, I felt something in my heart that resembled softness. It was a heartbreaking, heartmaking feeling.
She melted my permafrost in that moment. I cared. Suddenly, I could feel tenderness again. That was a frozen ocean melting and surging to meet her. I owe my change in seasons to her. My summer finally returned.
Agricultural studies
Today a teacher who I have admired all year pulled me aside after class and told me that the reason she teaches is because every once in a while she comes across a girl like me, she said she is fascinated by my brain and my thoughts and that I have a special gift. I could have cried. No-one can understand how much it meant to me - to be seen, to be appreciated.
