Heel! Heal!

In Texas I eat chips and salsa like an animal. I get protein from sour cream which I always thought was gross. The animal metabolizes quickly. In eighth grade I licked cream cheese off a plastic knife and my friend’s mom made me shower outside for the rest of vacation, because I was an animal. In third grade Amanda and I got too friendly with her stuffed animals and her dad shamed us severely. Animals.

Four years old, folding napkins, setting a table in French, pretending I liked vichyssoise. Nine years old, twirling pasta in an oxford shirt. I was fucking spotless. I was loved when I was spotless and I was loved when she was high. Seen and not heard.

Fourteen, doing coercive sex things and finding syringes. Elbows off the table, frizz flattened, 24 inch waist, every waking hour in high heels. Fourteen. Seen and not heard.

I wonder if animals abuse each other. My cats fight and scratch and hiss but no one gets called a bitch or gets held down and spit on. I read Men Explain Things To Me and wonder if abuse is normal and customary. I want to be a good feminist but the fact is that the men I hate share a viciousness with the women I’ve been unable to love. We scream for equality but don’t question power. And abuse is power. The power of someone to cut your speech, say you don’t matter, your reality is less than mine so I’ll talk more and louder because: power. The correcting, the tone that’s shows who’s boss, the name calling, the policing, the yelling, the declaratives, the threats, the unheard children becoming unheard women, patting down anger and aiming to please.

If Solnit can convince me mansplaining lives on the same spectrum as femicide, what is momsplaining? Is it cute? What about the excuses of addicts, narcissists, sociopaths?

Do we stay quiet and patient and quietly patiently die?

Instagram has memes about healing now, if you can see the humor there. Heal our wounds and end the abuses in a country that put Kavanaugh on the bench. Heal our wounds and end the abuses in imperative spandex, and no one calls wellness weight control with ‘ethical’ as a branding tool. Heal our wounds and end the abuses but accept the arbitrary and imagined flaws attributed to your birth chart. Heal our wounds and end the abuses, while milestones, like motherhood, rule unchecked as holy. Heal our wounds and end the abuses if you’re beautiful healthy and wealthy enough to capitalize on that thing you make.

I was raised on god, soccer, food, and pain.

Only the love from food was unconditional.

And I’ll eat like a fucking animal, this is how dogs heal.