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There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.
“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.”
If this woman comes into my house, I may not let her leave. Is that kidnapping? Abduction? I’d have the best intentions.
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
“I’ve come to realize that a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about being your revenge sex, Sol,” I tell her. “You’re not. This was spurred by the realization that Edward gets what he wants, and I don’t, but reducing my story to revenge makes it about him. His betrayal was a catalyst, yeah. It was a spark that set fire to an unsatisfying existence. I had silenced the woman screaming inside of me so much, I didn’t even realize just how unsatisfied she was. I was. This life, this adventure I’m on—I’m orchestrating. Edward is a footnote written in afterthought ink.”
“Spread your legs for me, sweetheart,” he says, running a palm up and down my calf. “I would hack through a forest to get to this pussy, and I’ve waited long enough.”
There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.
When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.
