Breathe in, breathe out.
My god has this been quite the year already. A few days I had sex for the first time. I always thought my first sexual experience would be with someone I was in love with. We're told so many stories as children about how magical, and evil, and violent, and brilliant sex is for women. With the right man, sex can be revealing. It can shapeshift a girl into the woman of his dreams and make way for the possibility of life. A life filled with adoration and release and submission. We were told that this was the type of experience we should search for and that if we found anything besides this determined narrative, we wouldn't be happy. Not in the same way as the beautiful women from the fairytales. I don't know about you but ever since I was a child I fantasized about love and what it would do to me. I told my body to let the possibility of being loved and of loving have its way with me. And ever since I was girl conscious of desire, pleasure, and sexuality that's all I've ever done. I always thought being a late-bloomer meant being disconnected from your body and from the minds of men who I wanted so deeply to want me. I've always been late to things I've wanted most. My first kiss was this summer, the first time someone ever touched me with the intention of bringing me pleasure was this summer, the frist time a man ever slept in my bed was in the fall, and the first time I ever had sex was four days ago on New Years Eve. The last day of 2019, the last year in a decade of cravings. What am I still searching for? Love?
I used to be able to write anywhere. Little ideas would spark in my mind and I'd write them down, on the train or while crossing the street. And those ideas that felt like memories would transform into stories and poems and little glimpses of love. It fed me. But adulthood has made me numb? Maybe the idea of writing being both a passion and also a means of financial stability has got me all fucked up in the creativity department. And I know I'm not alone in this. People always say WRITE JUST WRITE! Write anything, write anywhere, just fucking do it! And I'm like, "well, fine!". And so I do, I write without thinking, I write all the time. And its always the same story maybe with a different name, in a different world, both reality and fiction. It's the story of a girl in love.
Classic, I know. I often wonder why it is all I can ever create yet the one thing that has never truly manifested itself in my own life. And I'm fully aware of how drawn-out it all is. But, I can't help it. I was texting with my best friend and I was telling her how I need to take a break from finding love and focus on myself this year. I think I'm looking for something. Something that I don't have, something missing, and in need of a home. But, it can't be a man. It needs to come with words, thoughts, and emotions that a man can never give me. Partially because I'm gay but also because falling in love will always feel like settling until I write the same story I've been trying to finish for the past 19 years.
They tell you to kill your darlings, kill the pretty to find the story that people want to hear. And they tell you to write about what you care about. Write what you know. Why I diminish my affair with love as trivial is a question I'm still trying to understand. But what I kill in my writing, every time I tell another story, how do I know those are my darlings and not my fears? I believe the words that spill out of me are the breath of women, of my ancestral matriarchs. And the world has always been so afraid of a beautiful woman. Is that, then, what I have been killing all this time? And why I can never finish the story? Why has nobody asked yet? Why the pretty women must die?
With so much love,
Zanele
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