“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.”
Richard Siken, Boot Theory // Frank Bidart, The War of Vaslav Nijinsky // astralcorbozo on TikTok // Mary Herbert, A Long Time in the Desert // Dan Deacon, When I Was Done Dying
Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides // Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘Golden State’ // Agustín Gómez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb //Desireé Dallagiacomo, Origin Story // Ilya Repin, Ivan The Terrible and His Son // Francisco de GoyaSaturn Devouring His Son // Ocean Vuong, Someday I’ll Love // Catherine Lacey, Cut.
But an unquenchable love for you has never left me…
{Quotes: Alejandra Pizarnik, Approximations/Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928-9; Sunday, October 7/chen chen, nature poem in ‘when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities’/sue zhao/ Sylvia path / Maggie Nelson, Bluets/Richard siken/Ingeborg Bachmann, In the Storm of Roses from ‘The Poem for the Reader’, tr. Mark Anderson ,paintings: pinterest}
My great grandfather used to always give me life advice. Even though I never asked, and I was far too young to understand. Yet he told me anyway. And I still remember the stories all the same.
He told me once that people who say life is short are scamming themselves out of time. And I was 9 years old, just wanting him to play piano with me. I didn’t care my life was at its beginning. I didn’t know his was at its end. Life, to me, only existed in that moment.
But time has past. Both fast and slow. And I think about his words a lot more now. At 26 than I did at 9 or 10. Especially when someone says life is short.
Because I suppose life does feel short when you think of it ending. There appears to be so little time for everything you expect to do and that is expected of you. How do you do it all in just 80, 90, 100 years? And that much time only comes to the lucky ones. Life can end so much sooner.
But then I think about two pairs of hands — one set tiny and stained from markers and the other wrinkled and scarred from a World War — moving across piano keys together.
Life could have been too short for a song. Too short for a few minutes alone with a great grandchild that was one of dozens. Too short for a life lesson about time.
I thought about it a lot. And I guess what he meant all those years ago was we spend so much time worrying about what we don’t want to miss out on when our time is up, that we give up the time we have. We scam ourselves out of time by thinking we don’t have enough of it.
Maybe I still don’t understand. Or perhaps there’s nothing to understand at all. Great grandma always did say her husband’s favorite pastime was trying to sound more profound than he was. But I’m only 26. I have time to figure it out. And if I don’t, I’ll never know the difference anyway.
[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]
a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”
ALT
