Waif

by Samantha Kolesnik

“The Time Before Men,” a version of myself I can never get back. I guess, you could say, some might also call it Innocence.

I was a flesh case full of secrets and other sad things. If our marriage did get worse—if he ever did decide to graduate from fist to knife and cut me open—all his secrets would come tumbling out. I would stain the carpet with our failed marriage. What would I be then, I wondered?

The older I became, the more convinced I was that no one escaped this earth unscathed by human suffering.

Excuses came easily at first and then I realized no matter how much I changed or how many imaginary eggshells I avoided stepping on, Matt only grew worse. I felt like I was falling in a dark bottomless pit.

There’s an interesting thing about life—you can justify anything to yourself if the desire is great enough.

That was the crux of my oppressive experience with men in the flesh—the ones you wished would touch you never did, and the ones you never wanted to touch you did so without asking.

“Just understand that everyone starts as a child. A mother’s beautiful child. A man—a man will never understand that. But you can.” She then leaned toward me and gave me a kiss on my forehead. Though it hadn’t been goodbye, it felt like it then. It was, perhaps, my mother’s manner of acknowledging I was no longer under her care, and that as an adult woman, I would have to navigate the world of men alone.

What made a man? Hatred for women, perhaps. If not hatred . . . then apathy. Utilitarianism.

I’d always liked many parts of my body but never the whole. I loved the way my waist curved in, and I loved the bulge of my hips. I loved my navel and my collarbone. I loved my thin wrists. It was strange how I loved parts of other people, too, but never the whole.

I decided that day I wasn’t good enough for women, and I went out to the bars that night looking to hurt myself with the nearest man, which ended up being Matt. I know it’s not rational. Does grief have to be?