When someone who hates you accuses you of the thing you most hate about yourself, that you fear to be true, it lights the inside of your veins on fire.
“I hate myself because a part of me thinks they’re right,” I tell my therapist. “I will never know.” After crying for an hour in their office over the fact that I don’t have a womb. That when I was twelve, I fantasized about being fucked by a big, strong man. The joy and danger of the possibility of getting pregnant a significant amount of the pleasure that took me over the edge. To find myself being incapable of feeling that now, now, now that…. why? Why would any man want to be with me? Why would any woman want to be with me? This thing that finds joy in the brilliance of a woman’s beauty, her curves, her being, but yearns to be a universe to a man, to be his world, to have his kids.
To only know this after it can’t happen. After I’m useless to everyone because when you’ve spent your life hating yourself, it becomes impossible to love or to trust.
“What a betrayal… you’ll never know!” She says to me, another mean girl from junior high, but now we’re both 46. I will never know. I am a betrayer.
The blood catches fire and burns until all I can see illuminated is the jealousy I have for others.