WHO GAVE THE MONKEY A MOLOTOV?

Well, it goes a little something like this. I never follow my own script:

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Five Inches.

Look at me. Blink and look at me. Do you see? Can you feel the piece of me reaching out unbidden and unhidden, waiting for that recurring touch of rejection that causes me to curl inside my carcass and hide myself away all day? Can you feel the 5 inches of steel in my gaze, representing a knife long lost and a scar left to remain?

Look at me. Wipe the sleep from your eyes, meet mine and surmise. What do you see now?

Glasses, shining like starlets and my mouth spitting those tongue-twisting tricks and wrapping around these words like a Lover’s digit buried deep inside of me. Drawing from my very core the most painful words I can imagine. Releasing any ideas and thoughts dragged from my deepest places, from beyond my womb, from beside the storm, where I am more the phoenix, burning and dying with every step to being reborn.

But those adjectives, once imbibed, are not the ones used to describe me. Not the ones muttered in the corners of restrooms, when I’m drinking down my flask of whiskey in my leather jacket, when I’m inhaling tar and chemical outside from the heinous racket of your evening spent sticky and drunk. Not the ones given when I can’t find it within myself to do more than line my eyes with black and tie my hair back, and sometimes press my luck with top hats and ties.

No.

This is not who I am to you. A mirrors shard, refected from your eyes, flicking back 5 inches of judgement in my direction, lacing this observation with pert affection.

Manly is binary, zeros and ones reflecting in my head and causing my teeth to hurt with the urge of stating that gender definition is absurd almost unstoppable. Obviously gay, which makes me feel like a stereotype or a statistic in the making, hands shaking for me to scream that Love is not that simple. An experiment, perhaps I am, but not a successful one which leads me to ‘A failure’, which makes me feel more or less like myself. A fraud but what quantifies this design you’ve placed on me, on who cannot speak of truth. And a Liar, but a writer with such pretty words, five inches or degrees from the person next to me.

To extend:

 “She could be pretty if she changed her clothing-slash-dyed her hair a normal colour-slash-got rid of the piercing-slash-some-other-bullshit…”

But the worst of humanity is in four letters and not even redeemable.

Ugly.

Who came up with such a word? It’s absurd how those letters can do more than just flame a feeling of inadequacy but can crush anything you have to say as your tongue, so dexterous, swells inside your mouth and leaves your brain frustrated and begging for release like an impatient partner who has to wait for your jaw to stop cramping.

And I, as me, as I have been before and always will be, weak to my core when my brain cannot work. Every word of wisdom spoken by perfection standing before me, a friend or foe or family, a barrage against shields designed to hold back hate, not kind judgement, to hold back weapons, not loving words, to hold back discrimination, not improvement. To hear those voices again and again, pressed further and further into my brain until all I can think about is WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I BE LIKE YOU?

So you’ll find me down on my knees, mouth open, begging, gullet ready, wondering when people will listen to my heart and you pull me by my bootstraps and rope me to your table, Frankenstein, and slam the chains down and pull my clothing away and get to work, all without even buying me dinner, ready to stuff me with your 5 inches of advice, 5 tips to create the perfect woman.

And my mouth, drained of venom and cowed into submission and scared shitless of everything you are and everything I’m not, asks what you desire from me. Asks whatever it is you to take from me, to give me, to swallow me whole in your all-knowing, ever-bleeding bullshit. Swallows down your standards and coughs up my backbone, every vertebrae cutting deeper into the place where my nerves once roped defiance around my body.

You want me to bow in submission, prison bars and fission of what we’re supposed to be, dividing the hands and taking a stand to prove exactly what you want from me. You want me to rip this photoshop of what you desire from your hands and plaster it to my body like the latest dress from Gucci, short fingers splayed across rounded belly and thighs, pressing the picture to my flesh, tears glistening on my cheeks, hair coiffed and preserved and you, for once, calling what is left of me beautiful. To feel the plaster-cast mask of make-up fill the holes where my personality was, to cover the scars, the ink hidden in silk, feet propped up in 5 fucking inches of metal to cause me to totter around and break my toes and give me blisters the size of fifty cent coins, all the price of beauty.

And with this, you will finally be happy. That a woman, such a girl, with a face so ‘nice’ and eyes so ‘bright’ to be as beautiful as the sun setting over the ocean at the end of the day, oranges, pinks and blues reflecting in the place where my soul used to be.

Within where you place me in, which represents your perfection, I am nothing. I am another face. I cannot sing, or laugh, or swear, or fuck. I cannot breathe, hanging from the words that shouldn’t matter to me, but in reality do. Beyond my apathy, laying out, choking down on more and more of this bile, this venom I cannot express, this repression, this suspension of belief.

Within this mess, this concept, within this identity, carved out in names and discomfort and the agony of being someone else, I am dead.

Nothing to be said, 5 inches of heel and I’m dead of a broken neck.

And I could cry out of wings broken from the stumps of what used to make me soar and made to be pillows for the listless to rest their heads on, where I stand clothed in prettiness every day, with no more inches of what I used to be like.

But I won’t. My teeth will be pulled and strung to make a pretty necklace if I do.

Beauty is a sacrifice, according to everything I’ve read from philosophers such as Cleo and Cosmo. And times come when I feel the need to rip away my jeans and t-shirt and replace them with something more conventional but those days are few and far between and not having them does not make me less of a woman than you. Does not make me less of lady than you and does not make us less sisters than we are. We bleed by the same count, we breathe, we love and we are all and everything, and no fibres will tell us any different.

No thread count will string who I am and who you are as different. I am you. You are me. Beauty is everything we can see. I will never tie you to a table and demand you to give up your Versace or Prada, or whatever else you so desire.

And to my brothers, who I can never forget, and respect is paid with every breath, I will never dress to impress your sense of entitlement, because if you wanted to sleep with me, what I’m wearing isn’t going to be that important, since I’d like to think fucking would be mostly skin on skin. An outfit is not an invitation for you to judge what ever we carry within and rank and frame and tick off and whittle and poke and prod and assume that a girl wants you just because she’s showing off skin.

To summarise and prevent the digress and to put this selfishness to finally to rest and to take a step of my soapbox, let me just request: that you take your hands off my leather jacket and chains, and take your entitlement and your blame and I’ll let you keep your 5 inches.