I read the news and hope it’s fake.
I wonder, is this what it feels like to choke on your own rage?
My eyes burn and I can’t breathe. I don’t have words. I just sputter.
There are no words left to say. I’ve said them all already, and there is no point in saying them again. I’ve been screaming into a void for months, achieving nothing but hearing my own voice echo back at me.
I want to break something. I want to cry. I wonder if I rip my tongue out by the roots and throw the whole bloody mess at my persecutors, if they will notice me then. Or will they step over my disgorged tongue, ignoring it as easily as they ignore me?
But my tongue doesn’t matter. It would be easy to ignore it if I ripped it out. It would make no difference to me or to them, for they don’t listen to a word I say and I’m tired of shouting at a mountain.
If I wanted attention, what I should rip out is my uterus. They would all notice that, if my womb splattered against their walls. “No, you mustn’t,” they would say, descending on me in a flock of squawking vultures. “We haven’t given you permission,” they would insist as they stuffed it back inside me, my hands tied down by ropes made of law.
That is all that matters. This one thing. As they stitched me up and held me down, I would try to tell them that I am more than that. I have ideas. I have hopes. I have plans. I have a brain and a heart and a life that is mine.
But they wouldn’t care. They would turn away. Because now I’m uninteresting. The womb is the thing. The womb is all that matters. That is all I am. A container for the womb that no longer belongs to me. Something can’t belong to me if everyone else can tell me what to do with it.
I am crying now. And I am afraid. And disgusted.
My husband and I discuss having children, and I hope for boys when I once wanted both. I feel like a traitor, wanting only sons.
But a daughter’s future is too terrifying.
If I am afraid, and things go as badly as I fear, what will her life be like? Will they tag her as soon as she slips between my legs; put a tracker in her so that they can control her better? Monitor her fertility? Keep her leashed and lashed, like a dog that’s gone rabid? Will they tell her what her value is, what she can be, who she can marry, all based on the one thing, the womb? Will she be required to give a man children, even if she doesn’t like that man, even if she doesn’t like men at all?
Will the state rape her?
What can I do for the daughter I’m afraid to have? No one will listen to The Thing With the Womb.
So I pick up a pen, and hope that it really is mightier than a sword. I hope I can use it to skewer my oppressors. I hope they bleed black ink that forms the words to give me back my freedom. My body.
My hope for the future.
I write these words, and they are real. I’m not a character in The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m not a tribute in The Hunger Games.
I am a sacrifice on the altar of political distraction.
I look at the clock, and see it ticking backwards, and I wonder how this could happen, how they’ve bent time.
The Land of the Free.
They make it a lie.
The Home of the Brave.
They make it truer than ever.
I am a woman, and I am a person too. I choke again as I write the words. I grit my teeth. Because I shouldn’t have to write them. It should be obvious.
I am a person too.