I Was 12 The First Time I Was Catcalled. A Middle School Boy I’d Never Met Found His Eyes Lingering
I was 12 the first time I was catcalled. A middle school boy I’d never met found his eyes lingering on the hem of my school uniform’s skirt. I wish I’d worn the long navy blue pants instead. I wish I’d worn a cock and balls as well to keep more boy’s eyes far away from me. But there was no way for me to avoid the screaming missile of womanhood. All I could do was listen to my girlhood ripping itself out of my fingers; my fingers that used to hold dolls now holding my tongue. A brutal silence I wore as woolen armor to protect me, and enrage me all the same with its intrepid itch. I shouldn’t have had to be quiet in the face of boys lusting after me, so eager to pursue manhood that they mutilate my girlhood. It shouldn’t have been taken from me by someone who used to see me as a cooties carrier, or on good days, a friend. I can barely remember all that they said now, but I cannot shake the feeling their nasty words gave me. I shouldn’t have had to understand what it meant to be a woman before I bled. But the world is not kind to its creators. Every foul mouthed boy crawled his way out of a woman, only to seek another to whittle down into a Venus doll. The boy ogled me alongside my two friends. He too, was not alone. He asked his friend toddling alongside him with an audacious voice which of us they preferred. “I like the tall one,” he said as if choosing flowers to pick from the ground. An act of collection, of killing the thing you covet. My friend piped up and said, “we’re not objects on a shelf,” but I still felt their eyes burning into our backsides. The boy and his friends spat words at us under their breath that I cannot remember, and we walked into the middle school gates feeling heavier than before. Unwillingly we were no longer school girls, but vessels of sexuality tempting men and exciting boys. I felt my crotch turn from a place I peed from to an open wound. I felt my skin tighten, I was trapped in a budding teen girl’s body when I yearned to keep my childhood just a little bit longer. I was 12 the day before. But in a matter of sentences I was dragged into womanhood, and I lamented having known girlhood at all.
-diary of a former girl
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Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.
My skin prickles hot; I asked the old man a question and he answers with a story so far unrelated I had to turn around and see just who in the hell he was talking to, because it certainly wasn’t me! Yes or no will do just fine, I kept hearing myself say in my mind, my voice gentle like a kitten’s fighting tooth and nail to drown out his gravely droning on about airplanes and the war. Outwardly I must’ve been screeching fake niceties and not pulling off my polite half assed head nods because his eyes were wide, and albeit dull as ever but he seemed perturbed. And that’s saying something because men like Robert don’t seem anything, they’re simply half dead elderly men roaming the earth to challenge God. Look how long I’m living! Keep knocking Jesus, I’m not opening the door! I can’t imagine being a gold digger and accidentally marrying a Robert. Undying so much as they are unriveting. Later I looked in a mirror and saw my face, still plastered up fake happy from our little conversation if you could call it that. I understood instantly why he seemed so off-put by me, I looked clinically insane. This fake it til you make it crap has got to work for somebody but it is undoubtedly not me. Unfortunately God put me here to be as authentic as possible—to punish me of course.
We see each other’s Instagram posts.
But we don’t talk much.
I know what he thinks of the current administration. He likewise knows what I think of it. We play music on the car radio and sing along, not saying the words aloud.
I hear the posts on his phone undulating like neon gelatin, sugary nothings calling to him. A mixed bag of nuts that instagram feed, one post is an ai cat driving a semi and the next a cry against the white identity under attack in America. They’re both for my father. The algorithm knows him better than I do, he listens to it more than his own daughter. Our conversations are rarely in words.
He has women up in his garage, I covered them with grumpy cat pictures when I was only a girl. Make it lighthearted, make it fun, my objection to his sexualization of women. Why am I so eager to cater? I am a woman now. He has maga hats now, Trump ornaments up when it isn’t even Christmas. On the other side of the ornament is a mirror. It’s poetic. I keep turning it around, putting Trump’s face toward the wall and the mirror toward my father begging him to look. He turns it back around. How can I look at someone when they cannot look at themselves? How can I speak to him when we never have?
That is the curse of living, that we choose what is familiar and not what is good.
Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.
It is between worlds that I sit, holding the hands of the future. Virtual realities spin before me as threads in a spindle endless, and I marvel at the fabric of us changing. Breathing life into our imaginations. It is here teetering on the tightrope above oblivion that we navigate ever forward. Lead by our ability to imagine something new, something better that what we have now.
Is everyone on the verge of completing and utterly losing it?
Or am I here on this cliffside alone?
And I am content to keep hurting. I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing.
It does not matter the school you come from but your passion for your subject. There are private school boys who have never lived life, slept through it as it is but a dream to them who will never know the endless strife of the girl from nowhere trying to make it in this world on grit and determination alone. No money in her pockets to cushion her falls and catch her when she is pushed back from the gates of academia. Only the belief that she will get back up; propelling her like north wind on a shanty sail.
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