Oh page!

She is not a man. She does not walk away untethered. She is caught by spider web strands that pull her back whenever she moves. She is not a man. She does not get away with saying things like, You’re so nice, or, Always a pleasure, with sarcasm. She is nailed to the curse jar when she mumbles under her breath, asshole, or when she spits the word, jerk. She is not a man. She does not have the excuse of being a man. Oh, he’s just a man, he doesn’t know. She has to know everything. She is not a man. She does not get led by the hand, pushed, shoved, kicked towards self-hood. She crawls on her own hands and feet towards some semblance of understanding, or misunderstanding, or un-understanding of herself.

But there is a man in her. There has to be, or she wouldn’t be the woman she is. She buttons up her collar to the top, shoves her hands deep into her pockets, takes long strides. She speaks, uses her hands. That’s the man in her woman, the woman in her man. But what of this man/no man/woman? She knows she is the lucky one. She gets to write them both, man and woman, into words on a page. She gets to watch them both written into words that she writes. The words have to sit on the page and be. To be someone’s words, written into existence, is to be unlucky. Words are not their own, poor things.

But she is not an unlucky man/no man/woman word. She cannot be on a page that someone else has written her onto. She writes herself into herself and the page is left to hold her - all woman and the man within. The page maps the web. The page doesn’t let anything get away. Oh, page! Thank you!