JUST GIRLY THINGS: a Horror Checklist of Real and Surreal Thoughts from Poetic Hell
Here lies a body of words which arrived at my window one night in jagged fragments and forced me to make their cacophony into a less than sophisticated arrangement of reverbs:
There are many paths that can and have been taken when describing the internal pandemonium of womanhood and femininity. Academia, popular culture, and interpersonal/intergenerational correspondents have laid the framework of understanding the hidden hymns sung by women and femme bodies in the "safety" of their own minds. From a survivor of sexual violence feeling like an "animal trapped in a corner with no teeth or claws" or Megan Fox's titular character in "Jennifer's Body" in the scene when she is staring at an old image of herself and not recognizing the body in front of her in the mirror, a mystery in a passing reflection, to sleeping with academic writer Jackie Wang's “trauma monsters” under your bed, these are merely three points of many entries to discourse. Informed by mind-numbing propaganda built by the fiction of white male supremacy, we are all experiencing the agonies and coronation of identity. Some of this awareness is beautiful, like poetry, and some of it is horrifying, like the prospect of Hell. And this is how I define my womanhood: a poetic hell.
With the aid of fellow femme bodies and allies (whose names have been contorted for privacy purposes) in the following pages I arranged the aforementioned cacophony into a tangible list of experiences you may or may not have experienced but surely relate to as I have no control over the words I wrote and have no personal experience with many of these sensations but still identify truth embedded in each one. It'll make sense when you begin reading them. I promise. And if not, sorry but never talk to me. I envy you.
A fun game to play is to check off each experience that does feel familiar and to compare who has the most familiarities with the following convictions within your clique (additional points to those who can correctly identify the carefully constructed pseudonyms). The winner should receive something like a voucher for a therapist session and a shoulder to cry on.
☐ Getting a banal check-up (eyes, flashlight in mouth, blood withdrawal) at your doctor's office and staring at the misunderstood cracks in the yellowing walls the entire time
☐ Holding your best friend, while both bleeding from the nose
☐ Bearing witness to your school's shooter as he killed himself after killing your closest friends and feeling his heavy boulder of a body slump over. Every time you have sex with a man in the missionary position you are always recalled to this moment. A form of visceral necromancy
☐ Singing sanity slippage songs in the mirror
☐ Resisting the call of the void to cut off one of your fingers while dicing the veggies
☐ Pointe’ing
☐ Standing frozen behind the front door when a stranger rings your doorbell
☐ Remembering that you used to pretend to suffocate your baby dolls with hugs and now fearing that this alludes to a career in filicide
☐ Biting your lip as a symptom of anxiety but this being confused with offering sexual appeal
☐ Waking up to red paint being thrown on your windows (entry from the protagonist of the 2003 novel and 2011 film of the same name, Eve Katchadourian)
☐ Stockholm syndrome
☐ Being eaten
☐ Bleeding from your bosom while professing your love for a stranger on stage at the VMAs. Princess Diana is watching from above (entry from millennial polymath, Lady Gogo, circa 2009)
☐ Kissing your wrists every morning and night feverishly to prepare for your wedding
☐ Climbing the walls
☐ Never not waking up every night at 2:34 to find the man from your dreams watching you in the dark corner of your bedroom. “Isn’t it romantic?”
☐ Flirting with gluttony
☐ Recording yourself eating your own tampon in middle school because that was the "only way you knew how to break the curse" (entry from previous Internet sensation, Giovanna Blowman)
☐ Craving the taste of self destruction
☐ Eating in the dark
☐ Catching your sister’s eye at an orgy that you were not supposed to be at because she thought you were out of town on business
☐ Regret
☐ Being a neurotic lore fantasy girl or whatever those unloved misogynists masked as film directors and incel-bound men think you exist as
☐ Making love in 2019 (entry revisited from acclaimed fiction writer, Miranda August, taken from Everyone Belongs Here More Than You)
☐ Looking numbly at yourself in the mirror as you brush your teeth and subconsciously begin brushing your face with the electronic toothbrush, covering it in your used toothpaste. "Is this that new skin care routine Bella Hadid does?"
☐ Sucking a heart shaped lollipop which an Internet personality told you is supposed to suppress your appetite but still craving dark meat
☐ Eating yourself to death in a hotel room
☐ Leaving your bedroom window open so a lover may take you in the middle of the night
☐ Looking patiently out of your bedroom window at the sea wondering if he’s cheating on you with a siren
☐ Resisting the lure hymns of televangelists
☐ Sprawled over your countertop as you’re being suppressed by the gravity of your own trauma and looking as if you’re giving birth. A novice birth
☐ Looking at yourself in the overhead mirror above the bed in the Honeymoon Suite, but not actually seeing yourself
☐ Crying in front of your daughters
☐ Preemptively blocking all the exits so you can burn in the movie theater (entry from singer/songwriter, Mitski Meeyawaki)
☐ Burning your house down
☐ Getting solemn (entry from the “Queen” herself, Beyond Say)
☐ Walking home from the store through your neighborhood with your groceries and the kids in your neighborhood think you’re a monster as they see blood from your period run down your legs and you’re met with disgust and confusion for the rest of your days
☐ Being French (entry from the fictional love interest of the 1997 film about a doomed ship, Daisy DeWitt Bukater)
☐ Deciding between being a sexy angel or a sexy devil to a Halloween costume party
☐ Feeling the smooth exterior of the stones in your pockets as you taste saltwater (entry from literary heroine, Virginia Wolf)
☐ Putting toothpaste on your craters (entry from the singer behind the 2013 international pop hit entitled “Royals”, Gode)
☐ Being a sexually frustrated teenager and talking to Therese from Balthus’s "Therese dreaming” at the Met and she tells you how it feels to entombed in a frame. You relate
☐ Stabbing the outline of the female symbol into your right thigh
☐ Breaking your nose from hitting your face during your spasmodic ritual dance
☐ Collapsing from toxic shock syndrome on your dirty kitchen floor
☐ Eating men like air (entry from our patron saint of poetry, Sylvia Path)
☐ Getting pneumonia by being baptized in a cold river
☐ Marrying god after two years of being in a polyamorous relationship
☐ Decentering your art to expand beyond the horizons of "boring traumas" (entry from musical artist, Fiona Pear)
☐ Ripping off your black moles because you’ve been told that darkness is a form of sacrilege (black was never the new black)
☐ Eating glass for dinner because you don’t feel like cooking
☐ Putting your hand in a blender
