I Want You To F*ck All The Women In Me

The female heart carries courage in the chambers that pump blood into lifeless souls, for it has learnt to surreptitiously push itself through tsunamis that dismantled strategically established structures with a mere hair flip.

It knows how to put make-up in crowded metros, when all the women wonder why she’s so obsessed with the idea of putting up make-up, that she’s doing it here in front of everyone, when she could have done it within the confines of her home. Or wait, eyebrows raised, with questions on their otherwise serene morning faces, “why do you need make-up when you’re beautiful the way you’re?”

To the women going to office without wake-up, standing firm amidst unsettling remarks, “your eyes look patchy and droopy”, 

“are you sick or didn’t get enough sleep?”

Her dark circles are easily ignored evidences,

of all the nights she was up convincing her family, to let her go to another town for her undergraduate degree, and from the time she spent breastfeeding her hungry daughter in the middle of the night, or from ensuring that socks don’t keep falling off the little feet of her son.

To the women who spent 6 hours dressing up, fixing it, re-doing it, deciding it’s all been done wrong, so staring over all again, imitating the women on the Internet, finding just a fraction of the perfection she was looking for.

We know how years of societal ridicule telling you that you’re shorter, darker, heavier, slimmer, taller, than other women or than what men would have liked,

has reduced you to a zombie feeding off on other people’s shallow validation,

and how deprived you’re of the goddess that sits in your chest singing victory songs to the gods in heaven,

proclaiming how it learnt to fight,

from the time when she was a ball of blood and flesh in her mother’s womb, hearing carefully drawn strategies to strangle her before she can come into the world only to learn what the world will snatch from her,

from the time when genital mutilation was the only way out to keep her from letting things in,

from the time when marriage stumbled like an unprecedented warning call over her ears when the only thing she wanted to hear was, “well done, you’re meant for great things!”, but she forced herself to learn each word of the “Guide To A Happy Married Life”, 

learning how to find happiness in her husband’s happiness, and her so-called “conflict of duties” didn’t permit her to utter a word to her parents,

because daughters can be scarred and sacred and scared, but no matter what, they don’t come back home once married because they were never yours to begin with,

from the time when she could claim the streets and dance naked celebrating her glory, being unrestrained and beautiful and ugly and melodramatic without giving a fuck to any tag that tried to push itself down her throat slowly choking her and claiming everything she could have been,

from the time when liking pink and hugs and romantic movies were blurred lines segregating the dumb whores from the intellectual bitches,

from the time when Holi (the festival of colours) was an excuse of a festival for men to feed off her in socially approved ways, leaving marks of their convenient pride over the skin that she proudly wore, over the skin that just wanted to see the colours of life, they showed her the colours of their souls when she was just 7,

from the time when they told her she would never be able to walk or dance because she is too fat to move like that and has flat feet that will stifle her aspirations to keep pace,

from the time when being beautiful was a warning bell that would never stop ringing and being ugly was “desperation dressed subtle”,

from the time when standing up for yourself was being a feminazi-sick-hysterical-neurotic-abused-crazy woman, and being silent was ignorant-dumb-weak-powerless-submissive, 

from the time when glancing through books under bed covers were plans to destroy established civilisations and control systems meant to maintain exploitative structures,

from the time when letting a man touch you wherever he wants however he wants defined how much you loved him by surrendering your body-mind-soul at his feet even though he refuses to let you stroke his hair when he “doesn’t feel like it”,

from the time when biting my lip was sexual and uncovering my breasts could wreck havoc  over the most dead faces in the room,

from the time when you divorced me and left me stranded in the middle of the road with your child in my womb and I still tried my best to ensure that our daughter could have a relationship with her father despite the abuse that became my everyday life,

to the time when social media where I find the illusion of being able to say what I feel, is a careful traitor trading my messenger (a place to initiate communication) in the hands of men, who can’t resist telling a woman they don’t even know, how much they wanna be frandz with her, and fuck her under the streetlight in a car that stinks of their unfriendly odour, but they say that the hostile smell is of her unclean and hairy vagina, wait but try naming the patriarchal instruction manual that told you to equate a woman’s genitals with roses and lemons and peach, so I can have that shit banned,

from the time when travelling alone meant being a money bank deliberately putting itself on sale, to the time when a simple activity like travelling alone was enough to get me called “rebellious”,

when it was nothing more than a statement of my power, defying your

suffocating

nerve-cracking

fear-installing

soul-wrenching systems,

from the time when leaving my hair open meant a rude declaration of my recklessness on an otherwise warm winter day, and

how sitting with my legs spread wide grants you commodious certification to get right between them no matter how much I scream,

from the time when sex meant your entire being reducing me to pieces with the blink of an eye, without taking the time to understand what my body wants and how it responds, when it meant letting hormones dictate the anxieties of my confused head and shivering soul,

I think today is your day to fuck me,

show me how you will fuck all the women in me, because I swear that though the women in me are tired,

they will fuck the fuck out of your fragile ego rusting at their fingertips,

if you take a close look at us,

you will see how we are so tired our bones would’ve given up on us 

if we didn’t have this perpetual sadness keeping them together,

our wombs would have refused to nurture lives 

if we didn’t push hard enough to

expel out lives that could live by everything you wanted to kill,

our blood would refuse to flow

if you weren’t following our unchaste moves with the vigilance of a midnight cop,

look at us, my dear,

we’re about to change the world,

the tables are turning,

the lights are getting dim,

keep your shoulders down,

don’t grin like that in front of me,

stop your suggestive wink emojis,

step down from that

convenient

biased

system-granted

CEO chair

that your ass is so accustomed to,

your time’s up boy,

your time’s up my boy.