Author: Danielle Shorr

Let him miss you
Let him roll over in the morning to find you gone, your absence filling the empty side of the bed like a flood
He will drown before he even wakes up
Let him know what it’s like to have the sheets to himself when his hands reach out and find too much space to grab, a vacant imprint of you still on the mattress
Let him crave the hold of your body against his, laying down, molded together in unison
Let him miss the crook of your neck and how his face fit perfectly in it like a hollowed shell
Let him miss your skin and his own announcement of its softness
Let him miss how fingers would run swiftly along the folds and creases
Let him miss the tracing of your veins that led him home, a purple and blue reminder of familiarity
Let him miss your legs folding between his while sleeping
Let him miss your breath in his ear
Let him miss your words blanketing around his fears and his stresses, how your language was the only kind capable of calming
Let him miss your comfort like a Midwest winter without a fireplace to lay in front of, like below zero temperatures with a broken furnace in charge of heating the air
Let him feel his heart leave his chest when he thinks he sees you at the store, at a concert, bar, restaurant, all of the places he knows you aren’t
He will look for you anyway
Let his lips mumble your memory with every shot of whisky that meets them
Let him taste you with each cigarette he smokes with the intention of forgetting
Let him hear your voicemail when he calls you at 3 am
Let him leave his drunken words to a mailbox you will never check
Let him say your name in his sleep
Let him wonder where you are tonight
Let him feel your ache in every muscle, every bone, every limb
Let him wonder if you’re aching too
But don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing you are

Don’t tell him you are splitting like the red sea, your heart spilling as it parts
Don’t let him know you are near freezing to death without palms to protect you from the cold, how this December was one for the records
You will look back and wonder how you ever managed to survive
Don’t let him know that getting up and out of bed is a ropes course you are still trying to complete
Don’t let him know that every bit of ink made permanent on your body is too much reminder to look at, that the words are growing with unwanted by the second
Don’t let him know that tonight you are too far from the sun to expand
You are shrinking from the darkness and you don’t know how to let the light back in
Don’t let him believe that your smile is anything but a portfolio of happiness
Don’t let him know that your laugh is merely a symphony crafted from regret
Don’t let him know that he is the ringing in your ear that refuses to go away like a migraine, bringing blurry vision and a pain in the back of your head
Don’t let him know you still crave him like a bad addiction, the withdrawal being the worst it’s ever been
Do not let him know if you miss him
Do not let him know you do
There is no purpose in missing what never made you whole
You are enough human without another to need you
If he misses you tonight, let him
If you miss him tonight, don’t.

I once read
That in 7.6 billion years
The sun
Having reached its maximum size
Will shine 3,000 times brighter
Than it does now
I have always wondered
How it is possible
To know such a thing
When 100 years
Is beyond a lifetime
How we could possibly
Look so far into the future
When now seems like an eternity
And tomorrow is miles away
How can we embrace the moment
When we are constantly being told to plan ahead
And what’s the point
Of waiting 7.6 billion years
When the sun is already
Shining
And the moon
Already loves her?

Woman is a title that comes with too many consequences shoved into the spaces between each letter. I have worn it proudly, not fully understanding the heaviness it carries, or exactly what it means. I still don’t.

Summer camp teaches me how to shave my legs when my mother neglects to. I am eleven, with hair on my skin barely long enough to pull out when my bunkmates coach me on how to erase it. “Boys don’t like girls with prickly bodies,” my counselor tells me confidently. I soon understand that to be woman means to be bare, stripped, and clean, always. Being woman means catching the changes of your morphing body before anyone else can point them out.

I am raised to keep secrets. We call the parts of ourselves that we aren’t supposed to talk about private. I learn to be silent in more ways than one.

A woman I love too much has smoked a pack of Newports everyday since her early 20s. I warn her about her how tobacco is a catalyst to disease. I tell her about the lines of family history I have drawn in connection to the woman in ours that have died from weakened hearts. She nods. I ask if she wants to stop. She always says,
“Not today.”

Haley is my best friend. Together we uncover the mystery of womanhood untold. She loves a boy two years older than us and gives herself to him in his parked car outside her house during one of our many sleepovers. I listen as she confesses the details to my eager ears. We learn more about sex from each other than we do health class. The information given out is too much and not enough at the same time. We are taught enough to do it, but not enough to ease our unknowingness.

Condoms are given out for free. Tampons are not.

Virginity was a concept we are told to maintain from early on. At 14 I want to get losing it over with so I do, with a boy two years older, in between his childhood sheets. I am high enough to blur the details, but not high enough to forget it happens.

I learn how to cauterize undesirable memory with substance, the way too many women do.

When a sophomore girl comes to school with a broken face, everyone is quiet. We all know about the fight, the pushing down the stairs, the bruising that swelled violently like her love for him. “I think he’s even hotter now,” I overhear someone say.

The first boy I ever love treats me like shit. I let him because that’s how it works in the movies.

I love a straight girl with curly brown hair and a smile too much like summer. She kisses me and then tells me about whatever boy she is pursuing that week. It confuses me to no end.

Mia meets her first love when we are 17 and gives him all of her too soon. When he dumps her, I come over ready with a box of popsicles in hand.

We play with Polly Pockets well into our teenage years. The dolls live out dreams impossible for us to reach.

I realize vulnerability is not an option, but something we are born wearing.

A friend shows me how to keep my keys peeking through my knuckles at night. I hold them through scared fingers as I navigate the side streets necessary to get home.

Mom buys me glitter covered pepper spray, “because it’s cute.” I know her unsaid words and what she really means. “There are too many bad people in the world to not be cautious, you can never be too careful.”

When a girl I don’t know well is attacked in a back alley by strangers, we sit nervously the couch and talk about the terrifying reality, how bad we feel for her, and how awful it must be to go through something like that.

I call my best guy friend immediately after someone I know takes my body without permission. I explain the details to him of what happened, still shaking from the shock of it. I wait for his response, hoping for open arms ready to hold while I shatter. He sighs and says, “you should have been more careful.” I don’t counter. I shower three times in a row, tuck myself into the same bed where it happened, and pick up the cracked pieces of myself in the morning. I tell no one else after that.

Rape is the punch line to too many jokes.
I don’t laugh.

In an anonymous thread, I read as people discuss the topic of sexual assault. My eyes lose count of how many times strangers say, “just because you regret it, doesn’t mean it is rape.” I have seen doubt cripple too many faces hearing the stories of survivors with dull eyes from telling theirs over and over again to people who will never believe them. Their truth is taken with a shot of uncertainty.
They ask, “Why survivor? Why not victim?”
They say, “It doesn’t kill you, you’re not a survivor.”
I want to answer that survival is a choice made in the aftermath of destruction, that we either chew our way through the broken glass or swallow it whole, letting it break us from the inside out. I want to say survival is not as simple as we didn’t die. Survival is consciously refusing not to.
Instead I say nothing.

I know girls with too many piercings and tattoos because they had run out of room on their small bodies to let out any more anger. I watch darkness fill their skin with its reminder, young girls who know pain all too well.

A man on the street calls out to me. I shake my head quietly because I’m afraid of the bomb my response could set off. I have seen too many ticking men explode for me to want to fight back.

I learn about abortion when I am too young to understand it, too self-centered at the time to try to imagine the fear of unwanted growing inside of her. I have grown to understand the importance of choice.

A guy tells me that if a woman has sex with more than five guys in her lifetime, she’s a whore.

Someone I hook up with shares with me about how his friends audio record their girlfriends during sex. He laughs, I shudder.

“Guys don’t like it when..” is a tip I hear almost daily.

School dress codes mark my shoulders unholy, my shorts too miniscule. I am sent to the principal’s office in 10th grade when I refuse to change into a top that doesn’t show my lower back. I ask what my body did to have to learn this kind of shame. I am suspended for the rest of the day.

Beauty pageants teach me that perfect woman is exactly what I am not.

My ex boyfriend calls me a cunt.

My other ex boyfriend calls me crazy. I’ve learned that crazy is synonymous with “she had an opinion that did not align with mine.”

In my college lecture we talk about the origins of hysteria, remembering how women in history had their voices twisted into insanity. I think about how often “calm down” is used as a modern-day-tranquilizer.

Us weekly tells me every week, in one too many advertisements, how to lose weight.

My campus paper posts an ad for breast augmentation deals. “Get spring break ready.”

I don’t fit into the bras at Victoria’s Secret, I never will. There is too much thick to fit inside their mold of beauty.

The size of my chest is too much a reflection of my brain’s capacity.

My brother says he will never be a feminist. His knowledge of what the word means is a shallow pond.

My mother does not want to quit her bad habits. She feeds her anxiety like a tumor.

My loving father’s own words, “our privilege is equal.” His blindness to the unbalance I have been trying to hold up with two hands my entire life. I am still lifting with the same force. I have carried too much, for too long, to let go now.

Being woman means too much in a language I do not fully understand. It is skin and bones, it is raw and blood, it is a mouth filled with words unsaid, it is fear and worry, it is an unspoken connection between us all, it is 75 cents to a dollar, it is censored body, it is pornography, it is being too much to handle, it is being equated with less, it is we are the same but we are not treated so, it is we are human in a world we call man’s, it is we have been struggling under the waves for years but we not drowning, it is we are still swimming, it is we will never stop, we cannot.

You are, almost
Tell me your first memory of happiness.

Maybe a swing set above wood chips or
collecting ladybugs in your pockets or
a perfectly cut sandwich you didn’t make
or the smell of grass mixed with chlorine
and sunscreen coating your skin under
a sky brighter than any future imaginable.
Pink frosting from cake dyes palms
into a canvas of sugary pigment
A popsicle melting down between
the webbing of eager fingers
Teeth are covered in chocolate and
face a mess and
all smiles,
it is funny how joy always seems
to be synonymous with
sweetness and
giggles and
the memory of being too young to remember anything fully.

19 is poison for a clock
it is reminder to wake up
after pretending to be
something you were not for too long
time is eating away the comfort
from your bones, I wonder
does candy still taste like candy
when it has grown stale?
when the shell has cracked and
all that remains is what’s inside,
is it still desirable then?
will people still want to know
what you feel like against their tongue
after you’ve already touched the ground?

The same texture but time
has made its evidence on you tangible
The juice once spilling from your hands
has become wine
The summer sparklers have become remnants of
cigarettes on your nail buds,
ashes of trying to forget,
you are no longer afraid of fireworks
the hairbrush holds another version of yourself,
a near stranger with similar freckles who
once insisted on only wearing dresses,
now you struggle just to get shoes on,
it was easier when someone did it all for you,
everything is, that way.
I don’t know when laughing became
a side effect instead of a soundtrack but
it still rings familiar, sometimes.

19 is more sour than lost
it is possible to know whereabouts with
a bitterness between your lips but
not all of your past is disintegrating
there is a love for saccharine that still remains,
more honey than cloying and
19 may be taunting down a candle to its wick
asking to be noticed but
it is ready to be uncovered
19 is golden
You are, almost.

I will regret this in the morning
But I will do it anyway
My impulsivity often overpowers my conscience
Yet I am almost always fully aware
Of the decisions I make
And their consequences
I am not exactly mentally stable
But I am sane enough
To know right from wrong
Yesterday from today
Love from lust
Although sometimes I mix them up
I have a tendency to lunge at any pair of arms that open for me
My mind and body often disagree
My body saying yes to eager hands
My mind saying no
Constantly looking towards my heart
Thinking how stupid one must be
To fall repeatedly
Get hurt every single time
And still manage to do the same
Over
And over
Again
I wonder
How many times I will have to hit the ground
In order to learn to stop falling face first
I often say things
That should be left unsaid
I often do things
That should not be done
Sleep in beds unfamiliar
Make believe love to strangers
Get to know people who will not remember me tomorrow
I am gone as quickly as the hangover
I can be washed off the tongue
Just as quickly as the liquor
I often believe I am capable of inciting change
I kiss temporary lips with permanence
Hoping that I can train them to stay
I love temporary people with permanence
Hoping that I can train them not to leave
And when they do
I claim to have seen it coming
I am incapable of forgetting
A scrapbook memory of skin and heartbeat
Of touch and moments
I know not to look directly into eyes
For they can be blinding
And I still
Do it anyway
I know of the risks that shouldn’t be taken
Well aware of their consequences
And I still
Take them anyway
You could say
It is my own fault
For the way that things continue to turn out
But I can make no promise of apology
Instead
I will live momentarily
Fuck up intentionally
Love recklessly
Fall unguarded
Break enough times to learn how to put myself back together
Crash into concrete enough times to learn how to shift a crooked smile
Into something worth seeing
I have been told that a life lived in fear
Is hardly a life lived at all
So I intend to live every second
Like it is the last one I will have
I will write each night as it happens
Narrate my own stories
And hope they turn out okay
I will regret this in the morning
But I will do it anyway.

I knew
From the moment we met
That you were going to ruin my life
And I was going to let you

I knew
When you picked me up
Your arms wrapped around my body
With the intention of holding
That you were going to drop me
More than once
And I was going to let it happen

See the thing is
You could break both of my legs
Shatter my bones
Into a million pieces
And I would still find a way
To come crawling back to you

Knees bloodied,
Hands torn from the pulling
I’ve never been one
For giving up easily

You could effortlessly
Take my heart and crack it open
Drink its contents
Throw the rest away
And I would still somehow attempt
To give you the remains

Call me selfless
But I am used to giving parts of myself
And receiving nothing in return

You could tie my tongue
My lips, my teeth
Split them into surrender
Into a foreign language
And I would still manage
To cough up your name

I have never learned release
Or let go
I only know stay
You could leave
One hundred times
And I would still wait for your return
With patience

Because kissing without permanence
Is like loving without memory
There is no purpose
If there is nothing to come back to
No reason in attempt
If it is bound to be forsaken

You had no intention
Of staying
This was something I knew
From the moment we met

That you were going to leave
And I was going to let you.