Mary: An Awakening of Terror

by Nat Cassidy

“The real curse of womanhood,”

“is that we never get to forget we have a body. And I don’t just mean because we have to look or move or smell a certain way. I mean, biologically. We’re so tied to these stupid, fleshy things.”

Anyway. My memory mansion has a lot of burned-out bulbs. Or maybe I stopped paying the electricity bill for too long. It’s mostly all dark inside. That’s fine. Life is simpler that way, I think. But in this one little room, it seems as though a light has flickered on.

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.

Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.

Boys usually get to keep that confidence, I think; girls have to give it back like it never really belonged to them.

Because the past is like the moon, isn’t it? It’s always there, but it shifts, it’s never the same when you revisit it.

The thing about faces, he’s saying, is they’re always a lie. Even before they’re slathered in makeup. Faces make us different from each other. And we’re not—not really. We try so goddamn hard all the time to be different, to be unique. You know what we all just really are? When you strip away the dumb expressions we all practice to try to look a certain way? Meat.

nothing feels safer than when someone else is the victim; especially when the next victim could always be you. The only way to prove you haven’t served your use is to endeavor to stay as useful as possible, even to a system that hates you. Oh God, do I understand that.