An Abbreviated List of Things Men Have Told Me About Myself

Age 5. I am told for the first time that I cannot do something because I am a girl.

Age 10. My best friend tells me that some boy asked her if I combed my hair. (I probably didn’t.)

Age 15. I am told I should try wearing makeup.

Age 24. You look better without makeup. (I was wearing makeup.)

Age 25. A man asked me, confused, if girls pissed through their vaginas -- after watching an episode of Orange is the New Black.

Age 26. That same man told me I was hard to love.

Age 26. On my first date out of that relationship, a man spent the first 20 minutes texting his fiancé -- he was polyamorous -- that I was someone he’d met online, and not an old friend, which is what he had told her. Then he mansplained playwriting to me. I am a professional playwright.

Age 26. A man stood me up -- for the second time in a row -- and then I ran into my ex’s mother on the metro platform. She pretended not to cry. I never heard from him again. I went home and cried.

Age 27. A man told me derisively that he associated hairlessness with femininity. I am neither hairless nor particularly feminine. This was before he fucked me, poorly. His cat was cute, though.

Age 27. A man told me with a sigh, after I read him a poem I’d written for him, that I “just wasn’t a back of a Prius girl.”

Age 27. A man on Tinder named Gavin asked me what it was like to look like Sinead O’Connor with AIDS.

What do all these things have in common, though. You might ask. Well.

I listened. I let these words worm their way into my heart and I said nothing. These quotes haunt the marrow of my bones like ghosts. I wish I’d made them up.

And you know what? The hell with that.

Age 28. I started to learn to take up space. To stop allowing people to explain myself to me. I started to step on or through man-spreaders on the metro.

Age 28. I started to share my stories onstage, online, to friends -- and found so many people similarly haunted.

Age 28. Sometimes my muscles remind me to be small again. I hunch my shoulders and stare at my clenched hands in my lap and I ignore the men on the metro who say things to me.

Age 28. I have resting melancholy face.

Age 28. But I wear short skirts and shorts and tight dresses that show off my hourglass figure. I get called Thick Thighs.I get told to smile, baby.

Age 28. I don’t.

Age 28. I took a chance on a young man.

Age 28. He tells me he loves me and he means it, just the way I tell him. We are equal and we listen to each other and we turn on lights for the darkness that we both hide in our hearts.

Age 28. We are not perfect.

Age 28. And that’s okay.

Age 28. I meant for this to be funny.

Age 28. I don’t know how this story ends. But I’ve always been better at beginnings than endings.

THE INVENTION & DESTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE

I have been thinking a lot about language lately.

Those of love. Those of grief and pain and loss. The language of our bodies. The languages that exist within silence.

I have never had a knack for learning the kind of language useful for when you visit some beautiful elsewhere.

But I can read you like a book. The lightest testing-the-water brush of shoulder on shoulder. A certain held gaze between people who have just lost the description of stranger. Smile lines etched into skin from the laughter of lifetime. A shy, sideways glance. Wild, uninhibited gesticulation. In short: poetry.

Then there is the language between people. I speak specifically here of romantic love. Or people who have romantically loved. Moments, days, years of definitions given to common words. I feel the loss of the most recent language I spoke freely, fluently, deeply in my heart. That language is dead now. The two people -- the only two -- who created it effortlessly, who spoke, heard and felt it every day?

They live on. Beautifully. Happily. Better.

But that tiny language-universe is dead. That intimate language is no longer. A thing that once existed no longer exists. It can’t.

So I have been thinking of language.

I am finding myself there — new, raw, more questions than answers. Little words for infinite things and moments and gestures. I am learning my own language. I am re-inventing it. And with it, myself. I speak in poetic device, in wordplay, in banter, in the caress of a rough chin covered in stubble at 3am.

Someone taught me the French word for “the perfect word’, which is: mot juste.

But I love, too, the imperfect words. The messy and the ugly and the tangled.

I think I could spend the rest of my life learning these languages. Inventing, discovering, sharing, and keeping them between me and a kiss.

I know some will be destroyed.

Sometimes I will do the destroying.
Sometimes I won’t.

And yet. The more I think about the loss of these private languages, the less right the word “Dead” sounds.

There are words that will always mean something to me.

Maybe there are archives of these tiny love languages. Rows and rows of them so far back you could never find the end in a lifetime. Miles of words and letters and moments and the first brush of new fingertips on electrified skin.

The language of my particular heart has been replaced by a new one. Perhaps, someday, years from now, an overheard conversation will make me ache for the language I knew so well in my youth. Perhaps that memory will warm my heart rather than breaking it.

This is not sad, she said, reminding herself.

Well yes — sad — but also: life.

The nature of life is to keep going.

The nature of the world is spin forward.

There are words that become perfect in their meaning between people. Lovers, friends, communities. We invent secrets to whisper to one another:

“You too?”

“Me too.”

I am finding, in the turbulent wake of locking up a heart-language, that I am discovering a new one. Plural. The capacity, I am finding within myself, for learning.

New words for old things. Old words for new things.

The old languages will eventually be tucked away in a little corner of my heart, when they are good. Carved away with time and patience when they are not. And they will fade in their silence. In their unspeakable way. In my inability to communicate them, having lost the person with whom I communicated. In their no longer belonging to this world.

I am a tower of Babel.

I am an archive of the beautiful and the arcane.

I am becoming. I am. I have been, and I always will be. I am myself, fluently.