Septembre 26th

Next month I’ll complete another cycle of my life. I think back to the girl I once was and she feels a different lifetime ago. I think back to her and she is a different person to who I am now. I am not the girl I was a year ago, but she hasn't entirely left me either. I think of a girl who traced spirals on her stomach in the garden, watching birds fly across the sky, I was a seed, than a girl, I’ve grown into a fig, my favourite fruit, and once that girl who laid tracing spirals onto her stomach thought herself an apple, that’s what everyone else used to eat, that’s what everyone else had.

I remember once a man telling me i’d never be a poet, the look on his face smug, as he told me a woman was too emotional to ever conceive anything of meaning (how many times has a woman heard that she is too emotional?), that meaning my passion, my emotion my being, and I turned then at the thought of being a woman, my body turned into itself, a woman, once praised I turned repulsed at myself, a mind contorted in lies. I’m innocent but I’m no saint. I find eroticism in everything, at sliced fruit and the shadows on the walls, in the lamp light and rising dawn light, and I’m no saint, and I’m not innocent and I walk around the house in my dresses barefoot, and I hate certain clothes on my skin, and I dance while getting ready and the rug is soft beneath my feet, and I see now no shame in the human body (something I am truthfully still learning) , there is no shame in being human, and I hang my bra around my room, and I hate wearing it, and I love watching my body move in the shadows and I love the way I can move, what a privilege it is to move, and I’m no saint and I love the feeling of the cold on my bare skin, and even more I love the feeling of the sun spring warmed and summer tinged on my skin, on my thighs, on my chest, and I suckle at the figs and pray to the tree, and I wear grapes around my neck, and I think one day I’ll dance for Dionysus, maybe I already have, and I’m a mixture of people who fell in love for centuries, my eyes once lived a century ago, and I want to see my body change, and I want to dance in temples, and I want to see it all, and I want to trace my palms in the dirt, eat the first breeze of spring, I want to taste it all until I am so utterly botanical, sweet, earthy, until my skin smells of thyme, and I want to the beauty of something ancient and there was once a time I was ashamed of being a woman, flesh sexualized since birth, I came out crying is this how you imagine me to stay, covered in blood, all blood must flow back into the earth. Cassandra once cried and not a soul believed. There was once a time and that time is no more and I shalt be the woman before me, but I’ll be her also, I’ll be all the woman before me, back to the first that spoke my name, like it was a God being born from the night, woman a God.

and by tomorrow I’ll think of more to say, and I’ll be a day older, and I’ll write it down and I’ll sing my name and hope it is still whispered from one mouth in a century to come.

Dilectē, Beatrice.

cover image from pinterest