We Were Never Here

by Andrea Bartz

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.

That’s womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.

Which was worse, being invisible or being seen? It was exhausting: the ego, the desire to be noticed—even admired—always dilating and contracting, flapping open and crumpling closed, over and over and over.