by Gill, Nikita
and therein lies your torment.
The Epiphany
I did not realise how little
I loved myself
until I understood
that when there
Were four of us in a room
I only counted three.
I finally grasped that in a room
in which there were other people
I always forgot to count me.
Loving What is Broken
It is the way
of the world
to teach us that the things
that others desire
most about you
that you learn
to love most
about yourself.
Your flame hot flesh,
your capacity to give
without taking,
your inability to say no
in the face of love,
your quickness to amend,
your ability to nurture
without nourishment
for yourself.
But have you considered
that it is the parts of you
that are broken
which others
refuse to love
that need your affection
the most?
The Becoming
You became.
When you believed you were nothing.
When everything you loved deserted you.
When you crawled out of the abyss.
When the darkness was so great
it swallowed you whole.
When failure tried to pinch
your soul between its greedy fingers.
When everyone you cared for broke your heart.
This woman that you are today,
You became her by breaking
Over and over and over again.
Allow no one to take that away from you.
You are valuable. You are precious.
Because you built yourself from shards.
You broke to become.
When The Monster Calls
The monster inside your head is smiling as he soaks in the moonlight of your mind. ‘You are,’ he growls, his languid, dark, body rising as a dark, clawed paw reaches inside your memories, ‘a pretty thing on the outside, but who will ever find a way to handle these mangled insides of yours?’ His claws gently strum through your memories, as though they are his private collection of music, until he pulls out your greatest nightmare and holds it up, victorious. ‘This,’ he clucks softly, ‘is how you lose everyone.’
The terrible thing he holds is a kerosene sodden, dark laced memoir of trauma and tragedy. A thing that still makes you awaken sweat drenched and trembling in the middle of the night. It is the moment that changed everything. The secret you are still mourning, all these years later. And almost every night since it happened, the monster arrives to torment you with it.
Do you know what you must do the next time the fiend calls?
First you must stop calling him a monster at all. For the greatest weapon he and that terrible memory have over you, is your fear of the fall. They depend on you being scared instead of doing what you have to do. He stands between you and your journey into healing. So you must face him bravely, you must survive the breaking. The monster is simply your beautiful, broken mind, trying to convince you to let go. And when you finally face him, take the memory from his hands, understand that it was not your fault. This is how you will deal with it when chaos ever calls.
Survival
Everyone you love
is capable of doing
great and terrible things
things you never
thought they could do
when they are clawing,
panicking,
breaking
to survive.
Remember this
when you watch them
at their very worst moments.
And forgive them
their survival too.
Journey
Compare your journey to no one else.
You are counties and stories already.
You are a million different words,
a million different ways.
You are forests and forest fires alike
A ship and the sea together.
The only person
you must compare
yourself with
is yourself.
Your journey
is your most powerful story.
Boys will be Boys
I want to ask everyone who says ‘Boys will be boys’ how often they say ‘Girls will be girls.’
You see, the last time I heard these words from a woman about her son when she had heard about him pulling a little girl’s hair in the playground and I asked if she would say the same about girls, her smile fell from her face as she said ‘It is different for girls.’ And my mouth filled with acid, contempt, all the words I could not say.
I want to say, ‘It is different for girls, because we have made it so. We have created a world where our daughters are held responsible for not just their own actions, but for the actions of men. We make our daughters suffer for how our sons treat them. Is it not burden enough to grow up in a world that is already more unkind to women than it is to men? I refuse to excuse my sons for behavior I would not tolerate from my daughters. I refuse to burden my daughters with the consequences of men’s actions against them.’ But instead, I bit my tongue and stayed silent, as thousands before me have.
A month later, I was told that the little girl had punched the boy in the eye for pulling her hair one time too many. His parents were furious and demanded action. She was taken to the principal’s office and forced to apologise to him, then disciplined appropriately. And not once was anyone ready to excuse her behavior as ‘Girls will be girls.’
And I still wonder, 10 years later, if the lesson she learned for standing up herself was that no one comes running to protect little girls when it is little boys they are standing up against.
Three Sentences
‘I believe you.’
‘You did nothing wrong.’
‘This was not your fault.’
Three sentences that can turn a victim into a survivor.
Three sentences that are not used nearly enough.
Hostage
‘I love you,’
they weep, their hands around your throat.
‘I love you,’
they say, as they betray you again
‘I love you,’
they whisper as they touch the orchid-like bruises
they have left across your skin.
‘I love you,’
they murmur as they force their hands
where they do not belong
How cruel it is
to be held hostage
by a love
that you genuinely believe
will one day be good
when it will always
be ruthless with your soul.
Silence
The tragedy is people see you as a victim
and they keep seeing you as a victim
because you talk about the thing that hurt you.
Because you talk about your trauma
Because you discuss the thing that tore you apart.
They do not understand that talking about it
Being brave enough to face it
understanding it
and allowing others
to see all of your vulnerability
is courage at its rawest.
You are a survivor
because you are not silent
Do not allow others
to define your survival
Because they lack the patience
The understanding
The courage to hear it.
There is nothing convenient
about freedom.
It is born from battle cries
and war, and blood,
and death
and people living for it
and dying for it
without ever getting it.
Never let anyone
tell you that it was easy
for you to have the fire,
the storms, the oceans
of strength
to speak your mind
that you have today.
The Truth about Art
People don’t look at art because it’s perfect. People look at art because it’s extraordinary, strange, different, captivating, odd, unusual, they look at it because it stands out. Some artwork is so entrancing, people spend hours looking at it and in awe of its strangeness. Sometimes entire rooms are dedicated to one masterpiece so it is given its proper glory. Perfection is boring. It is stereotypical. It blends together and it’s easily forgotten.
What I’m trying to say is,
You can strive to be perfect.
Or you can strive to be art.
Fire
Remember what you must do
when they undervalue you,
when they think
your softness is your weakness,
when they treat your kindness
like it is their advantage.
You awaken
every dragon,
every wolf,
every monster
that sleeps inside you
and you remind them
what hell looks like
when it wears the skin
of a gentle human.
Wild
I looked at everything wild
the birds in the trees,
the lions in their paradise,
the foxes and their prey
and thought:
‘Have you ever had to try
to make someone love you?’
and my answer came to me
like the wind whispering
it from the wild to my ears.
Never.
Never.
Never.
Weathered
The cliffs may seem magnificent.
But the truth is the cliffs are only there because the sea has whittled them down over time, the water weathering and wearing against the rock. From this, I learned that no matter how large my problems are, or how big they seem, if I work on them every single day eventually they too will be worn as can be.
Why She Stayed
And before
you ask her
why she stayed,
look at the way
a caged bird
sometimes
refuses to leave,
even when
its cage door
is wide open.
Even when
you call it
softly.
Even when you
try to take it
out of its prison
to set it free.
And perhaps then
you will understand.
Her Skin
Did you really think
that your hands on her skin
would diminish her worth?
Did you imagine that your manhood
was more powerful
than her womanhood?
She will grow,
her skin shed from the woman you had
to the woman she has become.
She will rise,
above your petty labels of slut and whore
to the woman who stands for none of it.
She will ascend,
like a battle cry
from a war you thought you had won.
She will intensify,
the way the ocean does
to take entire ships in her storm.
And when she has risen,
she will unleash on you how strong,
how truly powerful is her whole worth.
You are Everything
Remember that everything that men use is named for a woman. Every car, every plane, every ship, every bomb, every weapon, we refer to them as ‘her’ and ‘she’. Because deep down, they know that without ‘she’ and ‘her’, our very existence is limited. Without ‘she’ and ‘her’, the human race cannot survive. So wear your existence with the command, with the dominance it was born into. And never allow the world to convince you that you are anything less than the life giver that you are. You are power. You are everything. You are the architect of your own beautiful, wild chaos, your own destiny, woman. And no one can ever take that from you unless you let them.
Desecration
Every time a man takes
from a woman’s body
without her permission,
he is disrespecting the womb
from which he was born,
he is defiling the place
that protected him
when he was
at his most defenceless,
he is desecrating the temple
where he began his journey.
Pity these men,
then show them
what destruction looks like
when it wears the body
of a woman
who has been wronged.
Mythology
Woman,
Remember you are Pandora.
You hold the key to a box
full of terror and hope in your hands
and only you can destroy the world
or start it anew.
Remember you are Persephone.
Emerging from the darkness
when all hope was lost
embracing even hell
in all its fearsome terror.
Remember you are Hera.
The queen that brought
Gods and demi Gods
to their knees in terror
of her supreme power.
You are a myth born to the wrong age. You are the kind of book that has magical stories trapped in every single page.
Helen
Pretty girls have it easy, her mother always said to her whilst brushing her hair. And for a while, Helen was happy with knowing she was so pretty that she would always get her way.
Until she grew old enough to understand that pretty wasn’t easy. Pretty meant she could be used. Pretty meant that men would fight not over her, but over her beauty. Pretty meant that she was reduced to just a thing, property to be sold to the highest bidder. When the men came to ask for her hand, whether she was ready or not, she had to choose her husband, not a lover.
But Helen had a secret, a secret none of the men who claimed to love her would ever know. The blood that ran in her veins was not human, it was ichor. She was the daughter of the most powerful God, her half brothers Apollo, Achilles, and power, power was so much more important than beauty ever could be.
And Paris was sweet, and innocent in the way none of the men she had been with. But she didn’t run for him. She would never run for anyone, other than herself. Helen had never belonged to anyone the way she had belonged to herself. And her face may have launched a thousand ships, but that is what you get when a girl who learned that she had a dormant Goddess inside her finally began to awaken and become fire itself.
Aphrodite
Her mother named her Aphrodite, because in her eyes, there was nothing and no one she could ever love so well. And Aphrodite is beautiful, but she is beautiful in the way of the sea. The kind of beauty magazines can’t handle, but poets and storytellers can while away hours writing about, and to which musicians compose symphonies.
Every morning she looks into the mirror and smiles, admiring the twinkle in her dark eyes, the sheer beauty in her skin that is the colour of a night storm, and her hair the glistening colour of the night sky. Her waist and legs are thick, her figure fuller than any girl she has ever seen in any magazine, but she loves her body because she knows that they are wrong and she is right.
She walks with confidence, almost floating above the people who do not understand her, who do not treasure her kind of beauty. But Aphrodite has always known she is special despite the
ir wagging tongues, their inconsequential and gossip designed to be cruel. She knows because the night sky once kissed the ocean and that was the day she was born. She knows because her mother always told her, she could be anything she wants because her beauty is boundless, her essence incredible …
And never once, no matter what others say, has she ever doubted her own beauty, her own worth.
Artemis
Girls like Artemis are made of volcanoes and earthquakes, everything that scares people and the world can’t handle. They were made for beautiful things, for bigger things. So when people try to put them in a box, try to turn them into something they can understand, girls like Artemis simply fight harder.
You see, no matter how much you tell a girl like Artemis to be a lady, to stop her eternal hunt, to understand that the moon is not her true lover, that the way she dresses is not appropriate, she will do exactly how she pleases. Nothing ties her down to the kind of earth you have come from. Nothing makes her want to be less adventurous or give up her eternal search for something to quench her wanderlust.
She is different and she wears her individuality on her worn jacket, the one her mother has tried to throw away countless times but always comes back, her eyes always hunting for something more beautiful than the moment before her right now. She has been hurt before, but always, always has found her way back from the pain. You see, her heart was born a wolf. If anyone has tried to break it with their callousness, it has always gone for their throat.
