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Womanhood. Ruptured and Rebuilt.

  • Writer: Jesse Robinson
    Jesse Robinson
  • Mar 19, 2021
  • 6 min read



I wonder how much of my girlhood I own. Is it mine to give away?


If I don’t lie down with the boys who try to make me, am I still a girl?


What about when I want to, though. If I’ve turned away boys before when they wanted it, am I allowed to have it when I want it?


When he decides he won’t accept my no because his body is too far down the road of his yes to stop, he forces the sure…fine…whatever into my consciousness with his endless pleads.


All pleas, no pleases.


Is it really consent if he actually just wears me down?


And when it happens and his world isn’t changed in the slightest while mine is changed in every way possible, does it mean my girlhood is ruptured? Or is it just my body that is ruptured?


I see him again and his face sells a story that says nothing was ever touched. Skin was never sweaty. My yellow gingham sheets were never made malodorous by our two bodies. The night renders a memory only for me. A modicum of what I want from him, but not at all the way I wanted it.


My friends tell me of their nights with him. I’m equally crushed and relieved. Crushed that my evolution of girlhood wasn’t special or unique, just something else for him to ravage. Relieved because at least I wasn’t the only one who allowed it to happen that way.


He turns out to be gay. His insatiable appetite for women a hopeless salve for his shame. We’re all pawns while he chases the King.



I stay up late on Valentine’s night. I’m wearing a dress and stockings. I’m 18 and I’m in my big girl apartment hoping to do big girl things like have a fancy meal with a boy who, it turns out, is lying down with someone else in her bed. I fall asleep by the phone and wake the next day in the same spot hoping he has an excuse I can swallow. But I know he doesn’t. His words too slick, his eyes too grayish blue to be honest. Boys like him have a pass the rest of the boys don’t. He’s too good looking to ever be alone, so honesty isn’t the cost of the ticket for him.


The girl not alone in her bed on Valentine’s night is pregnant. The boy pulls up to my house in her car and feeds me a line about his mama needing help and that’s why he’s been hard to reach. But we work together so I see him most days of the week. I just can’t see him outside of work because outside of work he’s too busy with the girl growing life in her because of him.


We go see ‘Titanic’ in the theater and it’s our last time pretending we’re important to each other. He’s off to build a life as a big boy with his girl and their baby. Three babies fabricating a family.



I meet a boy through one of my customers. The first time I see him, the words in my head say, “maybe I should start settling for guys like him instead of the cute ones I always set my sights on.”


We’re on a date a week later and he’s mildly repulsive to me. But he’s heavy handed with the cologne and it’s a manly smell, so it convinces me we are going to be able to do a decent job of pretending to be adults together.


He’d rather play video games with his friends than be with me. His best friend once calls me a whore to my face and my pretend adult doesn’t say a word in my defense.


When I get pregnant and offer to split the cost of the abortion with him, he winces. My aunt convinces me he should pay for the whole thing, so I call him back with the new demand. He doesn’t say much, but his showing up on the day of the procedure with the money needed save forty dollars for the eighth of weed he wanted is all the passive aggression I should tolerate.


Of course, I tolerate more. I always tolerate more.


His mother snoops and finds the paperwork. Tells his entire family about my godless decision to rupture my uterus to rid myself of their family line. I let her tell me to my face that I defied god’s wishes, but the words are slippery like black oil on a hot day because I wasn’t raised with god, so I don’t fear his wrath. But her intention lands on me precisely how she wanted it to when she hurls these words at my already frail self-image.


I give only polite, diplomatic responses. Maybe the boy will like me more if his mother accepts me after all of this. She doesn’t, so he doesn’t, and I’m off to the next vacuous relationship.



This time, it’s the tallest boy I’ve maybe ever seen. He’s 6’7” so he must act like an adult, right?


He’s fine to rip my clothes off and climb all over me, but please don’t expect this to turn into a date, alright? At least not one where I affectionately kiss you in front of my friends. And definitely not one where we make a reservation for a nice meal somewhere. A bet on us placed in advance.


He needs me to watch his cat while he’s away and seeing myself in his closet mirror during daylight rather than catching my nighttime silhouette on the way to bathroom after he’s done with me, I realize this is the most adult he and I have ever been. Me housesitting for him while he’s hundreds of miles away. A silent and passive rupturing of a possibility.


Months into this imposter of a relationship, the only kind I’d ever known, an old flame arrives in town.



He’s home from school for the summer.


We see each other and it’s better than ever before. I don’t imagine where or when we’ll do all the things I want us to do together, we just start doing them.


We spend long days at the beach. We establish rituals. We eat and drink and laugh and love with such ease it borders on hard to believe. Before I know it, he’s asking if it’s ok that he stay close to me for the rest of the summer. He wants my company, and he wants to make sure I want his.


I’ve tolerated far worse than this, so it’s an easy yes for me.


He’s an easy yes for me.


In that yes, he sees all of me. He sees my fears and my painful memories. He stitches together a blanket for me made up of all the ways in which it can be different and then wraps me up tight in it.


At the end of our very own summer of love, he returns back to his apartment in the redwoods. 750 miles north of where I live. We haven’t promised each other anything, so our future can’t be a disappointment.


When he calls me one day at work, and I’m forced to take the call on the sales floor of the department store I’m working at, he’s out of breath. I ask if he’s okay and he describes running home to call me. He’s chewing on what seems like rehearsed lines and then, “I just want to know if you want to come live with me.” I’m operating with half my wits at this point for being caught off guard, so I ask, “and do what?” “Be my girlfriend, silly” he mumbles timorously. I can feel my cheeks warm and my breath slow down. Everything slows down. Like it does when you know the rest of your life is starting right in that very moment.


On our wedding invitation, we include the very long quote from the end of “When Harry Met Sally” when Harry runs to Sally on New Year’s Eve and says, among many other things, “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” This is the phone call I took on that day at Nordstrom’s while all my co-workers buzzed around me picking up my slack because they could tell the earth beneath me was shifting as I spoke.


Had I tried out life with this man a day earlier, it would’ve been doomed.


I needed to be left before I could be found. I needed to be looked over before I could be seen. I needed to know the bitter taste of scorn before I could delight in adoration. I needed to be a girl to evolve into a woman.


I needed to be ruptured countless ways before I could understand what it meant to be rebuilt.


 
 
 

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