Women contain multitudes
Added 2024-01-21 01:58:44 +0000 UTCEdit* I wrote this accompaniment to this photo series after receiving some comments on Reddit from men who are clearly afraid of their sexuality. I pity them and the fact that they don’t contain the capacity to love a woman in a way that would allow her to realize her fullest potential and by proxy, offer them pleasure they couldn’t ever hope to imagine.
“Women contain multitudes”
My entire life, I’ve been an obedient, silent, shapeshifter, bending myself into agreeable, one dimensional shapes to maintain a small, digestible fragment, that could be swallowed without risk of choking. I’ve always been running from the mob, their pitchforks and daggers, nipping at my heels, threatening to drag me to the pire and burn me for eating the forbidden fruit.
“Witch!” I hear their hungry voices through the foggy forest.
A familiar voice beckons to me from the shadows, a lilting melody that has come to me in dreams. It bids me to enter the spaces where light does not reach and look at the corpses; all the parts of myself I’ve banished to this wasteland of suffocating blackness. They lay in the cold as they cling to life with ragged breath.
I’m struck with anger and guilt at my neglect. This is what fear has driven me to do. I hold them close to me and promise to care for them, to defend them.
I turn to face the shadow. “Teach me to fight, I don’t want to run anymore.” The darkness envelops me and my skeletons and when it clears again, I’m standing in a beautiful library. The books shimmer in the hazy glow of the spirit realm. “Eat” demands the shadow, and my skeletons indulge in the knowledge they crave, the knowledge I have starved them from. “When you are full and regain your strength, I will teach you to fight.” And the shadow dissipates into nothing.
Each idea I consume is more delicious than the ripest fruit. The knowledge satisfies me in ways even the heartiest meal couldn’t. Soon the parts of me that were on the brink of death, are dancing freely, laughing and enjoying all the pleasures of life.
I was once a flimsy, fragile thing, able to be picked up and moved by the winds of fate. But, I have become a creature with many agile legs with the power to flow over immovable obstacles and the strength to bend fear to do my bidding.
I am now a creature of the lush underworld, untethered and uninhibited. A wolf mother unafraid to rip at the throats of fear, doubt, judgement, insecurity, negativity, guilt, and shame.
Now, I only get on my knees for those I deem worthy. Those who do not balk at my many limbs or cower at the space I engulf when I unleash my true form. Look into my vast unknown darkness, does it scare you? Can you handle all of me?
