The diary of a girl named tease

crossroadsbela:

You are 16 years old and no one has yet called you beautiful

It does not matter much, you do not know yet that you long for the word

Cute is the best you are likely to get

You with your baby fat still in all the wrong places

You with your blood shot eyes and lank hair

You, little girl, who doesn’t even know what the word means

You are 16 years old and a boy wants to love you

You are 16 years old and a boy is whispering and kissing and forcing his hand into yours

You are 16 and this must be right

This must be the way that it goes

Romeo and Juliet were near to 16 weren’t they?

You smile because you’d like an ending like that

You’re 16 and you’re a child who knows how to romanticize all the worst things and you don’t know any better

You don’t understand the stories yet

You are 17 and you’ve been called beautiful

But it doesn’t sound quite right because the first time was never supposed to be from a girl, a being with skin as soft and supple as your own.

You with your heavy makeup

You with your high heels and books filled with poetry

You, somewhere in between drunk and high, reciting Sappho to her and wishing that she’d pin you down and turn you into some sort of twisted image of Jesus dying on the cross

You are 18 and the girl is long gone

You are 18 and your eyes are blood shot again

Your hair is long and you wash it with peppermint and coconut because you want people to remember how you smell long after you walk away

Your arms are weak from the books and a boy whose name you hardly know keeps sneaking up from behind and calling you beautiful and you think ‘Might as well’

Why not?

And so you dance with him and when he drops you off at home it’s long past midnight but you make like Cinderella and run before he can claim his kiss

You are 19 and every hungry homeless boy is calling you beautiful and every girl you see makes your stomach twist and your throat sore and you feel stuck in between what you want and what you need

Your hair is wild and falling haphazardly around your neck and your heels are loud against the floor and everyone will turn to watch you leave and this is what you’ve always wanted, right?

You are 19 with smudged lip liner and when a skinny boy who tells you that he doesn’t hate women like the rest invites you into a car, you go

When he slides whiskey down your throat you swallow

When he’s pressing you against the leather of the car seat you let him

You’re remembering that girl and how you had wanted her to pin you to a cross but now that it’s actually happening you’re wishing you could take it back

You are 19 and he has a strange look on his face and he’s calling you “pretty, pretty” and you wonder if he’d told you the truth before about hating women

You’re 20 and you’re writing poems for no one about Eve and Pandora

You’re 20 and your hair is short and your eyes are sharp and you smile bloody like Clemenstra

You laugh like Salome and you blush like Persephone and you’ve been writing the same story over and over but luckily they haven’t caught on yet

You’re 20 and you are getting mixed up on which Mary from the bible you identify with the most

You’re 20 and you realize that you’re probably older than they both were when their stories begun

You’re 20 and you tell the boys and the girls that you’re happy for them and sometimes you even mean it

You’re 20 and you’re kneeling in church and smirking through your prayers and you never meant to become this paradox, this combination of sinner and saint but you think that you may be alright with it after all

You’re 20 and you feel free to call others beautiful because you think that you’ve started to understand what the word means

Because you’re 20 and you realize that The virgin Mary was beautiful in the good way and Eve was beautiful in the sinful way and Helen of Troy was so beautiful that men fought a war to possess her and Salome was so beautiful that she could demand a king to kill for her

And you think you understand now that all of these girls were just that, girls

Girls who once were frightened of being called beautiful, because they knew what the world did to beautiful girls

Girls whose names we will always remember because they were beautiful and they knew it and they changed the world

You’re 20 and sometimes you mean this

You’re 20 and you look in the mirror and you declare yourself beautiful

–L.D.