I Am Not Your Final Girl

by Claire C. Holland

If we were able to evolve as we wished, women would all have wings. We would not be tethered to anything: the earth, that somber apartment, and all the things we cannot escape from inside our ponderous bodies.

I got tired of hearing it was my fault. I think we all do. That’s the crux of it, the cross that certain people bear— women, doctors sneer like it’s a dirty word and then they take your pain and put it in a bottle with a number on it. And the number’s always low, did you notice that? Maybe because pain is relative, but when pain is your relative, your nasty bedfellow, it’s hard to see them label it three when your mind is screaming twelve, when it’s ticking off time—

There is nothing else in this world like realizing you’re going to live and not being sure you can.

But it’s instinct, fleshly instinct, that drives her like a rat from water. To save herself.

when it happens to us it’s for the best, but when it happens to them it’s tragedy.

She is so tired of waiting —aren’t you?— for the world to become good and tolerable and kind.

A creature made docile with friction. I can’t exist in a way that comforts you.

Intuition is treated like a curse, because it’s not dense and sturdy as a man’s thick fist. They don’t like something that slips through fingers like water,

This is the wake for all things lost. Like comfort, which has sunk into the mud along with the body and the lie that someone else will save you. Press. Your body’s still drumming. A wound needs pressure to stop its overflowing.

If this is too savage and beautiful to bear, I’m sorry. The sea holds bodies too tired to swim, but there’s no ending for me here. I will bathe myself in golden light like water. I will live.