Mary: An Awakening of Terror

by Nat Cassidy

That’s the problem with these journals: they’re too nice. They put too much pressure on whatever you write to be worthy. And, as I’m so often reminded in my darkest thoughts, worthy is not something I’ve ever been used to thinking I am.

I don’t call them beautiful. It’s not that they’re not beautiful—my God, they are—but that word has too much baggage. It’s an outsider’s word and it was weaponized to render these women invisible in the first place. They are full of so much more than beauty. I tell them they’re amazing. Powerful. I tell them they’re here.

We invest so much in certain objects, don’t we? More vessels, dipped into the waters of life, holding identity inside. Which I guess just goes to show how little of what we think of as identity is really real.

People will wonder if we’re mother and daughter, or May–December lovers, and we’ll delight in their confusion. They will always try to condense our complexities into something simple and dismissible, because that’s what being a woman is, being too much for definitions and being defined anyway, out of fear, and my God, will we be fearless!

I just see the face of a woman with a lot of life left in her, if she’s so lucky. There’s a song in my head, and it seems to capture how I feel about her pretty well, all things considered. I love her more today than yesterday. But not as much as tomorrow. Who am I? I am just a story written in present tense. We all are. We are never finished.