At five years old

I am pushed off my scooter by a boy with dark hair.

I sit in silence as I wait for the teacher to escort me to the nurse’s office.

She tells me, “you know he’s just messing with you because he likes you, right?”

At five years old I am not sure what that means but I hold it in my hands like a keepsake. We pass this down through generation after generation.

“He’s doing it because he likes you.” Teaching young girls. This is what love looks like. Teaching young girls to mistake abuse for flirting. This isn’t what love looks like.

By 9 years old I know exactly what to do when a boy in my class trips me on the playground. He laughs with his friends but I don’t.

I want to yell and scream and kick and trip him too. But I don’t. I have been taught not to make a scene. Don’t retaliate because he’s only doing it to get a rise out of you.

Here, rise means reaction.

Here, rise means let him keep playing with you because you can’t win. Get up. Wipe your nose. And limp back home quietly.

By 13 I have met my first man that whispered things to me that only belong in the bedroom. “Baby, you look so good.”

I am already familiar with the art of melding my emotions into a plastered on smile. The art of forcing every howl I feel into a whimper.

You taught me this.

Remember.

I am constantly weighing my safety in one hand and the need to yell at the top of my lungs to any man within a 20-foot radius of me to “ Fuck off” in the other. I always choose the safer one.

At 16 I am still fighting this.  “He’s just doing it to get a rise out of you.”

Here, rise means to fight.

He’s doing it because he knows I won’t speak about it. Because fear has been engraved in my head since before I was born.  

But now it stops. Now I fight.

I am no longer afraid to let the wolf rise and let her run free.

Here, rise means victory.

Here, rise means what’s right.

I am tired of molding my howls to fit better in your ears.

This is the end.

You should be scared.