by Gill, Nikita
Reminders about Healing
1.
Your heart was made
to break and heal together,
so stop picking at the wounds
and leave it be.
2.
Some loves come with an expiration date,
like all things that are perishable
these kind of loves rot.
3.
Everyone you love is slowly dying
and if you choose not to love them right
they will die without knowing.
4.
You deserve a love that understands
how you fall apart but piece yourself
back together.
5.
It doesn’t matter
if it was only once.
6.
All broken things heal.
Yes, even the ones that look like
they are beyond repair.
7.
If he understood how you needed to be loved he would still be here.
Toxic People
Stop looking for people who will hold you still, instead look for people who want to help you fly even if it means you fly away from them, even if it means you never see them again.
Stop looking for people who turn your heart into a city when it is your mind that is a country and needs stimulation more than your heart does.
Stop looking for people who only want your beauty and turn away your chaos and darkness.
Stop looking for people who make you believe that they have gone away when you are right beside them.
Stop looking for people who make you feel haunted by your past mistakes.
Start looking for people who treat you like you are everything even when you feel like you are nothing, who help you understand that even powerful nebulas must fall apart to be reborn as exquisite stars.
Reminiscences
There are reminiscences that only return in pieces. A moment of pleasure disappearing between a flash of lips and teeth. A second of achievement lost between the sound of applause and laughter. An entire good day returning in fragments of sunshine and deep conversations. If only there was a way to capture these moments whole in our memories. If only our minds didn’t remember every detail of every tragedy and instead only kept alive our happiest memories.
Memories
There are memories we share,
and those we do not.
Some remembrances are too soft, too treasured
to be held by the hands of others,
fawned over and passed around,
like a diamond that must be examined,
exclaimed over, and adored.
Some memories are too precious
to share with anyone.
And that is where we keep
our most cherished recollections
of everything
and everyone
that once made us feel so alive.
Love and the Moon
Always let go when you love someone
if they choose not to stay;
because if they love you
they’ll always
know home is with you.
I have always understood this
because the moon sings a siren song
to the wolf in me every night.
But I think of the people I have loved,
the ones waiting for me at home.
And I return home always.
Because love’s call
has always been
stronger
than the moon’s.
Reinvention
Reinvent yourself.
Over and over again.
Plant new wildflowers
into your spirit.
Set a wildfire inside yourself
and then regrow.
Take the wildest thing about you
and nurture it till it blossoms.
Tend to the sea that resides
inside your heart
and listen to its storms
wash you anew.
How else will you let go
of everything
that causes
you such terrible harm.
If you are still
living inside the old you,
the person
who was so damaged
by it all?
I Love You
The words
‘I love you,’
are sacred
like the flowers
that you have grown
from seed to full bloom.
Stop corrupting
their holy innocence
by using them
as an apology
for the sins
you commit
against the people
who have handed
their heart to you.
Statistics
The statistics say one in four women will encounter the kind of man who has hunt in his eyes, and a hidden big, bad wolf in his smile.
One in four women may be too kind, too soft, too gentle to recognise wolves like him for what they are.
One in four women may think, ‘That is not a wolf, that is a simple wickedness, the kind that will thrill my bones.’ And this is not to say one in four women are naïve, this is to say that wolves come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. The kind of shapes that can deceive you. The kind of hearts that look like homes but are actually dens made of the corpses of love.
One in four women will be deceived and then broken, and used and turned into someone they are not.
My fear is this: if one in four women can be fooled by men who are not men at all, how many of us have big, bad wolves walking amongst us, waiting for their prey’s vulnerability to call.
For Her
Every day
I thank the girl in me
that believed my life
could still be
something magical
even when the darkness
was enough to chew her up,
and spit her out
even when the ledge
was close enough
for her to end it all.
She still chose life.
And I owe it to her
to make something incredible
of myself.
On the days I succeed
I put my hand on my heart
and whisper to her
‘This is for you.’
Fairytales exist.
They always have.
We just have to rewrite them
over and over again
till they fit.
Sleeping Beauty
The version of Sleeping Beauty I tell my daughter will be a fairytale about consent before it is a fairytale about true love. In it, I will pause and ask her, ‘Do you think it was right for the Prince to kiss a girl who was unconscious, just because he thinks she is pretty?’ And I expect her to say, ‘No. No, it is not.’
In my story, Aurora will not marry the Prince. In my story, Aurora will stand tall, say ‘no’ to a marriage with a man she barely knows and rule her father’s kingdom all on her own.
I will use this story to help her understand, no boy has the right to touch her without her consent just because he thinks she is pretty.
I will teach her to say the word ‘No,’ before she learns ‘Yes.’ I will teach her that others may think she is being difficult, but no one’s opinion matters as much as her own.
And most important of all, I will teach her never to feel guilty or wear her body as though it is a gift to anyone except herself.
Belle
Belle is fierce in the way lionesses are when they hunt. She fears nothing and takes on monsters with ease when it comes to protecting the people she loves. She looks at someone and sees their inner beauty before she allows herself to fall in anything close to love. She sacrifices her freedom, her most treasured possession, for her father. She stands out from the crowd and reads in a time when education for women was unheard
of. Her kindness and willingness to give to others is where her true beauty lies.
And yet, in the fairytales we tell our children, we first introduce her as beautiful rather than fierce, kind, independent, intelligent, giving, full of light and powerful. Even her name is a testament to outward beauty.
Her name should never have been Belle. Her name should have been Féroce. Her name should have been Liberté.
Ariel
In this fairytale, Ariel does not look at her childhood, her family, the ocean as though it is something she needs to leave behind for the love of a man. In this fairytale, she chooses her ocean over the Prince because she knows love is something that can happen over and over again, but everything in the ocean that is dying cannot be brought back to life again.
She uses her voice to empower other mermaids to stand against humans destroying their home. She nurses injured sharks and dolphins and fish back to health.
She wears armour, and with her warrior sisters topples poachers’ boats leaving them to fight their own way out of the water. She loves her body as it is and does not resent her fish tail and wish for legs or wish to be a land girl because she recognises what she was born in was special. She teams up with the sea witch and encourages her to use her magic to aid in her quest to save the ocean, home to both of them.
And maybe one day, she will fall in love.
And maybe one day, she will find a prince.
Or maybe one day, she will choose never to marry.
Or maybe one day, she will decide to rule instead.
But before she does any of that, for all her hard work for the ocean, she will be remembered.
Snow White
The thing with Snow White is that she isn’t so Snow White when the hunter tries to kill her. She grew up in a home with a stepmother who was cruel, which led her to believe that she needed to learn self defense before she sang to the birds or baked apple pie. Because little girls who grow up with the constant threat of a parent who does not love them in their lives learn to listen for footsteps, watch body language and understand it is they who are responsible for their own little lives.
Imagine, young Snow White in the soldier’s training area, wielding a sword, being taught by her father’s knights how to overcome any enemy. By the time she is grown, the girl knows her way around a bow and arrow better than she knows around a kitchen and the hunter had no idea what hit him when the princess he thought an easy mark had him on his back, his own sword turned on him in a second.
The seven dwarves didn’t give her refuge so she could cook and clean and do their laundry, they gave her refuge because they knew she was the rightful and just heir to the throne, also, they were just decent human beings. And Snow White never bit that apple, because she knew better than to be pressured by strange old ladies she had only just met.
She spent her years in the forest making up an army to reclaim her throne.
Don’t ever let them tell you that girls are made for glass boxes and princes and apple pies when girls are made for swords and shields and anything else they damn well want to be.
Cinderella
There is only so much a good person can be verbally insulted and abused before they unleash their inner, sleeping dragon. And this is why Cinderella, locked in her attic, doomed to a life of cleaning, decided enough was enough and decided to take some action.
Cinderella’s fairy Godmother wasn’t a fairy Godmother at all. She was the best damned lawyer in town, and she took Cinderella’s stepsisters and stepmother to the cleaners before they were unceremoniously thrown out of a house that wasn’t theirs. At the end of the day, that house was her father’s last possession and as its mistress, Cinderella could return it to its former glory and bring back its sunny disposition. She didn’t need to worry about balls and glass slippers because she took over her father’s business of trading beautifully woven fabric from lands far and wide.
When the Prince did come to her door, he hand delivered her invitation, and Cinderella, who had to leave for a business trip that very evening, told him she had no inclination. She needed no husband at the tender age of nineteen. And she didn’t want to become a princess and abandon what she had built, as a royal she would have no time. Because girls who were building empires for themselves did not need kingdoms to shine.
Little Red Riding Hood
Girls who survive trauma wear a certain vulnerability around them, and some men are wolves, they look for those girls, their eyes hungry for prey, their tongues filled with lies to pull girls like this back into the void they have just escaped from.
Little Red Riding Hood was a survivor too, and once, when a man had taken a step too far, she had told the story of what she did to the last thing that tried to devour her.
‘I let the wild seep in,’ she said, her voice perilously low, ‘I let him think he was going to win, but little did he know, I bare teeth too, sharper than his and a heart that has survived terrible pain young. When he tried to devour me, I took the axe from the basket and hacked until he was done.’
If you want to know the secret, if you want to know the truth, there is nothing more dangerous than a girl who is aware of the flames inside her, and all the damage she can do.
Yes. Girls who survive trauma do wear a certain vulnerability around them, but this kind of vulnerability is from where their greatest strength stems.
Alice In Wonderland
Alice’s rabbit hole began when she entered her father’s library and picked up one of the books she was forbidden to read. In it, the words were flavoured with anger and terror and beauty and everything she hadn’t tasted yet in her young life. People revolting, war, famine, anger at the aristocracy, compassionate philosophers writing famous ideas and wild theories.
Wonderland emerged when Alice found her love for reading, and even better, acting on what she read. She became a suffragette, fighting for women’s rights, and took every scrap of money she was given by her wealthy parents to feed the poor. Alice found a way to use her education for good. She found others like her on the way, and soon she was leading marches and earning the secret name the March Hare, with her suffragette friends who had their own nicknames, like the Mad Hatter for the leader who organised the protests and the White Rabbit for the woman who made sure everyone could safely leave a situation and the Queen of Hearts for the girl who could always charm their way out of police clutches.
She scorned the idea that young ladies of that time should not do what she did. Make change and make waves and create a world more equal for everyone that lives in it.
She was more concerned about making a change and in every little way she could find, she would.
And on the way, she found herself, an incensed, impassioned and extremely capable young woman, all because she let nothing ever stop her from making a change and nothing and no one ever could.
Heroes
We have to heal.
Even from the trauma
that we thought
we would never
heal from.
We have to tend
to our wounds
with water,
and love,
and the moon
and rekindle our fire.
We have to treat
our broken hearts
with kindness,
the kindness
we never received
from anyone else.
Because if we do not
choose ourselves,
if we simply stare
at our pain
and allow it to overcome us
then we lose ourselves forever.
We feed ourselves
so many stories
of princes and saviours
coming to protect us
from our monsters,
from our demons,
that we forget there
is nothing more beautiful,
more fulfilling,
than becoming our own heroes,
than savi
ng ourselves.
Girls of the Wild
They won’t tell you fairytales
of how girls can be dangerous and still win.
They will only tell you stories
where girls are sweet and kind
and reject all sin.
I guess to them it’s a terrifying thought,
a Red Riding Hood
who knew exactly
what she was doing
when she invited the wild in.
Love yourself loudly, dangerously, everywhere people have been afraid to love you, afraid to ask the way to cherish you, afraid to hold you. Love yourself most in these places, because who can be a better teacher to others in how to love you than you yourself.
Who You Are
You are a gentle, loving person
who has been told
by too many people
that you are difficult to love
