The woman as: a fuckable thing an undead, dead thing Gabrielle E. Capone
The sand is hot on the soles of my feet. I like the way it warms my skin—almost, but not quite burning it. It feels nice to be touched somewhere so private. I grew up and suddenly, touch could only ever be sexual. I didn’t and still don’t understand why we must have “private” parts or why we teach kids about the “good” or “naughty” things their bodies can do when they are still too young to understand what exactly that might mean. It was the men who taught me what my body was or wasn’t worth, and how it could change within a second if I were to make an incorrect move, cheapening myself. I have asked myself many times, “Who was I before I was beautiful?” I have never been able to come up with an answer—if anything, the original question allows for more to spawn, “What was I before I was beautiful, and could I ever get back to that?” There is a time in a girl’s life when she is most concerned with being a fuckable thing, and if you are not desired you might as well be dead. My friend Annabel is dead. I don’t know that I could even call her that—a friend. They found her body folded up in a suitcase. And I don’t want you to think that she isn’t really my friend because she’s dead or anything like that, but because I hadn’t seen her since we were in elementary school and even then, we had only met once or twice by accident on the beach by my aunt’s summer house. And I think what’s bothering me most about her death, which is an incredibly selfish thought to even have, is that if I were to have found that suitcase, I wouldn’t have recognized Annabel. I would not have seen the corpse and wept for a friend or a girl whose grandmother had fed me and let me eat on the plastic covered sofa in her sunroom, but as a woman afraid of my inevitable fate. I would’ve called the police with a shaky voice and choked
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