There is a girl, alone.
She grows out her nails to look like the acrylic manicure she can’t afford. She has acne-covered skin, coerced into foundation and endless powders every morning. And as the sun sets, on the 8th of March, the playful colours are not what her attention is focused upon – her eyes are busy scrutinizing the face in the mirror. Her eyes: no one looks at that. She awaits patiently for this time of day, when her features fade, she is rekindled with the lulling darkness. Concealed, a type of freedom.
April opens her phone. April walks down the street, now it’s dark – a sense of fullness. April sees what it is she should look like, and she does not feel safe.
The people on her Instagram screen that tell May how her features should be are also the ones shouting EVERYONE SHOULD BE A FEMINIST. The girl longed to join them one day, on those screens. The girl wants to act, abandon her cut up self and fathom into another, more confident being. The mirror, the phone, the street, they say she is not right for it. She becomes a product of her broken dreams. You cannot hear her dreams shattering, as far away there are insistent cries of TIME’S UP. The masses, orators of society, are making sure a single voice like hers remains unheard.
A fabrication, alone.
June walks down the street, briefcase in hand. This is the only way she is appreciated, the only way she is seen and not looked at. She looks right and left, at distant cries of what could’ve been, if she was born differently. If she had been born – beautiful. She looks upon the silver screen at what is not her. If she’d have simply married like her parents told her to, like her teachers told her to, like her wallet insisted, like her neighborhood, home, country beckoned, she wouldn’t have had to prove herself. Us girls, we owe it to our youthful dreams, as they screamed at us to stop.
The girl is empowered, but that is not it, no. She is a firm believer, and a fighter, but that doesn’t let her down. But it’s all of it, the world, telling her what to do, still, and her aspirations are suppressed behind a water coloured screen.
Asymmetric, an anomaly, a girl
Alone.