Difficult Women

I attract difficult women.

Women who don’t fit small hands or small plans. Who burn, incandescent with desire. Magic women. Warrior women. Women ill shaped to live in the residences of archaic ideas and grayscale archetypes. Women who are vermilion and canary and titian and cobalt. Who say the scary things and slay the dragons. Whom people find too hot, too cold, too loud, too brash, too too.

Women who are sewn together at the seams with steel. Who bend and even break but are never broken. Shiny, hard candy women who are bright and tough on the outside and a million things you’d never expect inside.

We know what you say about us when we’re not in earshot.

We are too much. Too hard. That we are more war than woman. That we’re too hard to love, when it’s you who’s never been taught to love without swallowing whole. That our expansiveness feels like a crater you can’t climb out of, when you are simply much too small.

We hang the stars in our universe. We ride in on white horses when the world is on fire, for ourselves, for our loves.

It’s not fucking easy. And it’s not fucking fair.

But it is.

You find fault in our being. In the ways that we have to go to battle everyday. You think it is all much too much, that the way the universe has called us to live is just too heavy for you.

There’s a privilege in soft, in easy, in unscathed that difficult women do not own. You are lucky, I suppose. But it also makes you… flimsy.

And because of this, difficult women find each other. We sing the same clarion song in a thousand harmonies all our own. We reflect back to each other that we are not broken, not missing pieces, but rather wholly, spectacularly present in a way nature has not called everyone to be. We admire the bravery it takes to wake up everyday and face down calamity while honoring the toll it takes on the warriors.

It’s not fucking easy. And it’s not fucking fair.

But it is.

And we’re not alone.

Here’s to the difficult women.

I see you.