I’m just a girl, and I know this because I
have said so more times than I can
count. To myself. To others. And then to pieces
of paper that I’ve gone and crammed deep
in past read books, which hold no significant value
to me now, except to serve as a reminder of a pipe
dream that, while friends and activist groups and
even the occasional doctor tell me is less a pipe
dream and more of an attainable and even a currently
present personal truth, is still, I occasion to believe, a pipe
dream.
I’m just a girl who seems to approach life
with a certain flavour of naivety, preaching best
chances and pretending through a still false persona
that I’m living out my own best chance when, in truth,
I am lonely, jobless, possess a shaky sense of direction at
best, and am perpetually questioning my own existence,
all the while fucking up any new friendships or experiences
I might happen to feign to believe could meld into a
daily reality, a perceived reality of which, I tend to imagine, nay,
hallucinate regularly.
I’m just a girl with an apparent insatiable exigency to
possess some magnitude of jealousy for
other girls whom I tend to perceive as perfect, despite
retaining the certainty that they, too, are likely to be
coping with the same or somewhat similar shit that I
am pretending to conquer by way of suppression,
a perfectly effective and acceptable method of dealing
with an issue, because suppression removes the issue from the public
eye, and allows for me to occupy some phony sustenance that is likely
akin to tossing rocks in volcanoes with the intention of never
seeing rocks again, while fully understanding this intent cannot
become reality and will, in truth, create more from that which
was tossed away in the first place.
I’m just a girl, and I believe that, I do, and I hold fast to what,
at times, feels like a fanciful hope, that others might believe me too and,
indeed, strangers do seem to be convinced of my assertion, knowing
no other possibility, and being unable to perceive the doubt
I feel that is less a kind of doubt and more a kind of fear
that I may never be taken seriously, or that that which I still continue to
suppress will never fully find a resting point of internal
satisfaction, wherein I will no longer feel obligated to
satiate my apparent exigency to be jealous of other girls
and, rather, be able to slip loose of the snakeskin label of my being a
fake girl, or perhaps, still further, that there might come a day when
others no longer attach that label while I continue to struggle with
the label and the fear and the feeling that I won’t ever be able to accept
myself, try hard as I might, and that the colloquial ‘it gets better’
means just that, that it must always be a process of becoming
better rather than a process with an identifiable end of the tunnel
that is actually worth fighting to reach.
