girlhood is a glossary of god
Written by Dan Aries
Image courtesy of @artbydasan
Smile, a man says. And, in the anatomy of femininity, there is a filtered boredom between the gap of canine-teeth from teenage girls. Something dangerous about the grin that it curdles the sky into menstrual rage; something ferocious about the grit of their jaws that it oil-spills the ocean into tar. Girls smile as the world burns into tattered pieces, smile through the hunger that threatens to consume every layer of their skin. Even with a sharpened knife between their lips, girls are cackling through the skies, the moon bathing the wickedness of their blood.
You could be so pretty, a man half-compliments. In what condition does pretty become humane? The clubs are faceless, and girls hitch up their fishnets to their thighs, hoping to reach the euphoria of divine. They wipe the mascara-streaks from their cheeks, mottling the ink like Van Gogh tragedy. Girls are so pretty; they could be creatures of their own. Which pretty do you choose? A chameleon with no identity? Gone Girl personified and manipulative femme fatale? Or urban legend whispering demonic chants through hidden tunnels? Do you want‘ pretty’ like coquette Lana Del Rey? Or a diabolical, Pearl-like killing machine? Girls run wild in the city and in their safe bedrooms. There is a sizzle of ambition just bubbling underneath the sheen, and forbid religion, they are going to let it all out someday.
Good girl, a man coos. Good girl or confined to rules? The summers salivate, the girls rot on the coastal side with their freckles and neon bikinis. Their decay permeates the air with the smell of Chanel perfume, and their bodies are ripped open to the ocean trenches. They wait to be drifted away into the unknown and break the rigid idea of femaleness. The vultures swim above them; they spread their wings to shield these girl-bodies from unbridled sunlight. And there’s so much heat that for once, the girls want to ruin the fairytales and dress themselves up in the revenge bodies of witches. They run to the courtyard with their corseted rage. They breathe a restless staleness of being good and domesticated. It’s dreadful, it’s ugly. They want to unbecome. And isn’t it a good thing that girls can grow out indelicately from their old skin of naivety?
Women, a man snorts. Yes, women. Girls possess love for each other that negates primitivity. It’s feral and undulating with rawness. They skin themselves with their unpolished claws, making all their“ bones, flesh, beauty, and horror” a sacrifice to the pink altar of their fellow girls. They transform each other into God, they braid their hairs with lilac branches, they scrape their knees in playgrounds, they steal the vicious stars without guilt, they vomit fairy dust into the darkness, they gaze through each other’s souls with a bleeding affection, they pray in sororal cult, they hug until their faces are crushed side-by-side like candies, they sizzle in thunders, they cry and scream nastily, they want to be understood, they like cannibalism as a metaphor, they cut a chunk of themselves for love, they are their mother’s daughter, they are their ancestors, they giggle to religious undertones, their witchhearts show malice, they wear red lipstick in apocalypse, they smash mirrors when the beauty standards are ugly itself, they rattle the glamorized metallic cage of patriarchy, they grow new hearts out of the filaments from their tears, they run away from their conservative homes, they wake up with the absence of their wings, they eat their insecurities that leave a copper-taste, they dream, they love, they sink their teeth into desire, they want to live a million lives, they relate to Virginia Woolf’s fig tree monologue, they are nuanced, and so many whirring complexities.
But one thing they are never ever going to be is‘ just a girl,’‘ just a woman,’ and‘ just a genital.’
Because if there’s one thing about girlhood, it teaches you to answer your own questions when god isn’t listening.
