by Gill, Nikita
Athena
Fall in love with a girl who spends her time lost in stories. Let her beguile you with versions you never knew about history, about the world, the strangest things that can ever be told. Allow her to bring you truths that you never thought would be spoken, the kind of depth and wisdom that you thought the world had long since broken. See in her eyes the stories that once moved you as a child.
Fall in love with a girl who would rather resolve the mysteries of the universe. Let her take you through time in a way you never imagined possible. Watch her lead you all the way across the cosmos with simple words and phrases that you never imagined could have such an effect on you. Science seems to bend to her will, but if you say this to her, she will shake her head and deny it with a smile.
Fall in love with a girl who values wisdom above all else. Let her become Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom before your eyes and see the world in a way you never thought possible. Let her make you spin in ways you never thought could happen. In the end of it all, she will become something different, something special. Something that no one else will ever be able to fully replace in your heart.
Fall in love with a girl who has a softness and an intelligence to her. The kind of girl who is always hidden away in libraries, hungry for knowledge, who grows excited over facts.
Yes. Fall in love with a girl like that.
Persephone
When people talk of Persephone, they always turn her into a victim. She was a wood nymph that was so innocent that Hades stole her away from her mother and brought her to a prison.
What if the real story was something completely different? What if it was Persephone in control and not Hades at all? What if she was bored of the flowers, discontent with her situation and wanted to make more of her life than the grass and the trees could offer her?
What if she asked Hades to take her away? And the God of the Underworld hesitated, but her sheer ambition, her fire just swept him away?
On earth, she was just the daughter of a Goddess, the quiet, pretty wood nymph who played in a forest.
But in the underworld, she is given a throne made of fire, a crown made of thorns and the fear and exaltation of the dead as they watch her in awe.
Persephone is the very definition of spirit and determination. She didn’t just wait for someone to come and rescue her from her discontent and strife, instead she took matters into her own hands and empowered her own future, her own life.
Hera
In this story, Zeus is every bad guy we ever fell in love with, coming home late at night or sometimes not at all, stinking of alcohol and other women, promising Hera every time she meets him in the morning, sleeping on the couch that one day, one day he’s going to change and he’s going to become a better person but that day isn’t today.
And Hera is the kind of woman who has the resilience and belief that one day he will change. Even when he screams at her. Even when he loses his mind at her, even when he tells her she is unlovable. And she believes in him all the way until one day, she sees him stagger home and he has forgotten once again that it is her birthday.
She locks the door and just listens to him hammer for hours. Clenching her teeth, because it would be so easy to just let him back into her life. She takes her heart and locks it away. Because she knows it’s too fragile to make any decisions right now. Her courage is made of pain and heartache and trauma but it is still courage in every way it can be.
At nights, she sleeps in a bed made of her own worst fears of not having him there and slowly, she grows accustomed to sleeping by herself. She grows accustomed to her own company. She doesn’t answer his calls. She doesn’t respond when he rings the doorbell. She takes her life and starts turning it into something beautiful without him. She learns how to love herself in the most intricate of ways. She goes out and spends times with her friends when she is lonely. She learns to love her alone. And often when she finds herself missing him, missing the good moments with him, she whispers to herself, ‘The absence of you has taught me how to love myself. So thank you, my darling, my dearest.’
Demeter
To understand Demeter’s heartache,
Think of every mother who broke her own heart
Time and time again to give her children a better future.
The mothers who walked away
from abusive spouses,
the mothers who faced danger
for their children
the mothers who broke their backs
just to give their children a better future,
the mothers who chose their children’s comfort
over their own every time.
And all this at the same time as nurturing us
from root to sapling to trees to forest.
There is no greater love.
There never will be.
You need not fear the wolves you hide in your soul. They were made not to hurt you, but to protect you against this world.
Too Much
There is a sky inside you
and it is made of flames
and it is made of rain.
But you refuse to release it
because someone you loved
once told you that you are too much
to handle when you unleash
all of your beauty,
your passion,
your vulnerability.
You are too much
when you are raw.
So instead, you hide it.
You hold in the storms
you slowly let the fire die.
All because you think
how no one can handle
your truth, your courage,
your pain.
Daughters
When you see your daughter falling into that trap the mirror has been creating for you and every woman before you: ‘Your nose is too long, look at that acne, you have strange eyes,’ a thousand flaws on one small form, pull her aside and remind her that mirrors aren’t a true reflection of the person you are on the inside.
Teach her that her body is her most beautiful, powerful gift. The way it heals her. The way it sacrifices for her. The way it aches. Every single one of its flaws aren’t flaws at all, they are there for a reason. Teach her about the ocean and how she protects the many lives within her. Teach her how her body is like the ocean, protecting the many parts of her that are so alive.
And eventually she will understand that everything about her is magic, and her body will breathe a sigh of relief and love her for it.
Courage
The way you love
passionate and all encompassing
is not something you should be ashamed of.
If they could not handle your passion
if they were scared by it
if they now make you feel guilty
for loving them too much
don’t you dare allow them
to make you doubt the courage
you carry like the sea in your soul.
You are not too emotional or weak.
Your courage is determined
by the room in your heart
to love over and over again,
despite having it broken
by so many who were unworthy of you.
Son
I hope when your son cries
you do not tell him he’s a girl
because you will always remember
his mother’s bravery
when she gave birth to him.
Or when he chooses a pink t-shirt
instead of a blue one
you leave his choices alone.
Or when he prefers art
to football and sports,
you applaud him.
Or when he expresses emotions
you encourage him
to express them more often.
Or when he chooses a man
instead of a woman to marry
you remember he is still your son.
And nothing will ever
change
the love you have for him.
Self Care
Sometimes the people you love the most are the ones that will cause you the most pain. And you will forgive them and continue to have them in your life. This does not make your pain invalid. This does not mean you should allow them to ignore it. This does not mean they are allowed to hurt you again. Continuing to trust someone who was the reason behind your hurt is no reason to allow them to hurt you the same way again. No matter how much they apologise and say they will change. No matter how much they try to guilt you and place blame. No matter how often they call you selfish for not forgiving them yet again. This is the meaning of self care. This is the meaning of self preservation. And you are never wrong to practice it.
Let Go
What holds you back is not your ability to let go. It is your ability to hold on and keep hoping on things that have not loved you enough to give so many chances to. One day, you will encounter a sea of tears and realise it is your own. And it will both break and mend your heart.
Only then will you move on.
Secret Language
We have always felt so unsafe in this world
Like soldiers, always on the alert
A secret language between us women
are you safe?
Have you reached home?
Did anyone follow you?
Because we have come to understand
that no one is going to protect us but each other.
And this bond of sisterhood is so sacred
I hope it one day destroys
the idea that women are competition
for each other.
Instead enforces
how much
we belong in
our fierceness for each other.
Fossilised Love
Sometimes I go digging
for memories of you
inside my own chest,
the way an archaeologist
does for fossils.
You are more precious
to me in memory,
less dangerous,
the same way
a carnivorous dinosaur is
in a museum.
And I wonder
how many of us are still
carrying our love
as fossils in our hearts?
Hunted
How do little girls with such happiness in their footsteps grow up to become hunted women? Where do they begin to start wearing that look of prey in their eyes? Where does that beautiful sparkle go? How does such innocence that comes from the sea and the stars turn into something that is so terrified of its own shadow?
And what do you do to bring it all back again? How do you turn hunted women into happy, carefree little girls again.
Primitive
The way we project love on our televisions, on cinema screens, at parties, the long walks on the beach, walks in the rain, none of this is real. People talk of love like it is patient and it is kind. Love is also dark. It is ferocious and angry and destructive. If you do not believe me: look at how a mother wolf protects her young. Look at how all the wild protects each other. And then ask yourself; do you really know what love is?
Precipice of Loss
Listen if you are there at the precipice of losing yourself, I will give you the advice I wish I could have given myself when I was thirteen years old, still on the training wheels of life, where loss and grief had not decided to make a ghost out of me, yet I could not understand the sadness that was trying to devour me from within. There, alone, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, making a list of people who would be happier if I was gone, it never occurred to me that the only person I really need to live for is myself. There I was, wishing, praying for love in the arms of everyone else, and it never hit me for even a second, here, just take those two arms you already have and wrap them around yourself.
If I could see her again, I would say as I say to you now: look, look at all of the things you can accomplish all on your own. You will rise, simply because you believe in yourself, you need no one else to believe in you. You will go through devastation and draw your own body out of the wreckage, time and time again. You will rescue yourself from drowning because you taught yourself how to swim out of grief. Other people do not matter. No one on that list is coming to save you, the person who will save you, time and time again, already exists inside you. Whisper her an incantation, awaken her the way one awakes a sleeping dragon. You may have been given wars in this life, but in you there lies an army, you just have to know their battle cry. There is no justice in the world. You have to make your own, because believe me, the cosmos that gifted you the chaos, also created you with care.
Reset
Sometimes I wonder if the Gods created
our bodies to reset because they knew the destruction that was going to be hailed on them.
As if they knew we would not know better
in how to look after our bodies
and heal minds at the same time ourselves.
For your healing wasn’t just a path of tears.
For every part of you that came together was stitched together with heartache.
Surviving
We live in a world
that would rather ask women
why did you stay
with someone who hit you,
than ask why the man
she had trusted with her love
had betrayed her,
had the audacity to think
he had any right to hit her.
We laud abusive men,
celebrate their success
despite knowing about
the accusations against them,
say that the women
who accuse them are liars,
and even if proved right,
say that she is trying
to destroy him.
That she must have
provoked him.
And therein,
I think,
lies the problem.
We blame women
for the very violence that
destroys their lives.
Therapy
The therapist used words like ‘trauma’ and ‘abuse’ like they were so commonplace. I think that is what scares me most. That the way they held my soul down and took from me in every way possible was nothing new.
That my bloodied and broken spirit was one of many that had walked into this office before. That she had heard this story so often, she had turned clinical from empathetic.
And then the fear turned to anger. How many of us are out there? How many of us have been destroyed this way? How many of us have been left on the precipice of death and not cared? How many? How many?
And when were these bloodied spirits they had ripped apart going to finally heal? And I knew then in asking myself the question there was an answer. It is when a sheep like myself rejects her sheepskin for that of a wolf. It is when a sheep like myself chooses to become a warrior.
I hope every single one of us that ache become stronger every day. That we all channel our inner wolves and turn into warriors in every way.
They may have taken us down individually, but they cannot destroy an army made of us all.
Small Magic
On the days my sickness talks to me,
I remember small magic.
I remember the way the pretty ivy
outside my window entwines
with white wood.
I remember the way the rain
softly taps against my window
to help me fall asleep.
I remember the way the universe
loved me so much, that inside my body’s cell,
it placed little universes that are its mirror image.
I remember the way I am loved
by the few people
I know will never leave.
And I allow the small magic
to sing so loud and so happy in my ears
th
at my sickness forgets how to speak.
Temporary
Like the leaves of the trees
that shed and leave with the wind
never remembering how to return
never coming back again
so shall you be temporary to people
who have loved you deeply too.
Remember this when you are cursing others
for leaving and wishing them back to you.
Pandora’s Box
There are days I feel
my womanhood is a burden.
Days when I must be
conscious of what I wear
because I do not wish
to get unwanted attention.
Days my breasts and my legs
