The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

Then we are all just useless there on the lawn, already painfully overgrown, waiting for Mother to find us.

“Love only your sisters!”

The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all.

All you were ever doing in the last days was making me unknown to myself. Revealing thing after useless thing.

If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort.

I love to cry, though. With King gone, I have forgotten to feel guilty about doing it.

I know that without being touched I will die.

Love as a protest within my body.

If the last year has taught me anything, it is that being alone is corrosive. I am a person unable to handle it.

Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women. This is one of the things you taught me about love.

That was how I learned the true meaning of your old mantra, The love of the family justifies all.

The violence came for all women, border or no border. It was already in our blood, in our collective memory. And one day the men would come for us too.

Refrain of the man, universal: This is not my fault! See also: I absolve myself of responsibility. And: I never said that. You can’t take the actions of my body as words.

The woman had not been ready to take the cure. Her body proved unfit. It was her own fault.