In your first year of university, your roommate’s girlfriend tries on a corset you bought online for a gala you are attending. She is pushing and prodding at it and your roommate says, “Being a woman is about the pulling.”

And that’s where it starts, really.

You are in the shower with some lemon-flower-vanilla-body wash-scrub-sandpaper-razor and you think a woman is a bowstring, pulled back and back, unable to snap or release, caught in a purgatory between wire to wood to tension.

When you are nineteen, you interview for a job that you are not qualified for and your interviewer stares at your chest and asks about the rose quartz tucked into your shirt, you try to wring out the acidity there like a well-worn sponge of warm, sticky shame.

“You’re not one of those crystal girls are you?”

“I just like how they look.”

(“You’re not one of those stupid bitches are you?”)

(“I’m a good girl, give me a treat.”)

(You don’t even get the fucking job.)

When you are eighteen, the world shoves your newfound adulthood down your throat like a doctor’s tongue depressor, no longer can you tell guys on the street who are twice your age they are creepy for hitting on you. Not that it’d ever worked anyway.

“If you’re 14, I’m 14.”

And how can you write about being a woman, when their defining feature is something you lack?

How can you write about being a woman without loving a man. Or getting as-close-to-loving-as-possible with a man.

And when you were very young, you sat with your heart at a dimly lit kitchen table and examined it like an untreated broken finger, crooked and cracked, a starfish leg, a lizard tail. You’ve tried to make it something liquid, able to fill spaces and people, like some rule about volume and mass you’d never paid enough attention to in math class to know about. A man had always been too big for the boiling water of your chest, too cavernous and hungry.

It is hard to love women, outside of the shady business of politics, because it is hard to love a thing you’ve killed in yourself. The needy and wanting feminine.

But feminine, you know, is okay, in spoonfuls and dollops and pinches. In its soft curve and dark lash. Feminine is okay, desirable even, as long as you exist in blissful ignorance of it. Your lips can be lined, nails manicured, hair shiny and sleek, as long as all there is in your bathroom is a bar of soap to break out when guests are over. You clean up deep conditioner and Maybelline concealer as though you are removing damning evidence from a crime scene. Low maintenance. You woke up like this.

(Nobody wants to see you wake up anyway, only the smudged under-eye mascara and giggly “we will regret this later” that comes before a fade-to-black.)

You hit puberty gut-clenchingly young. Twelve, younger maybe, but twelve definitively. You marked the moment, you’d been bent over a water fountain when you felt it. When a football player smacks a teammate’s ass, it is a display of the divine and indisputable masculine, to imply otherwise would be offensive.

(“Do you think I’m some kind of fucking faggot?”)

It is not, however, always a sign of camaraderie.

It only takes once, you know, to take your body from child to child bearing. You resist this change, but it shoves a crowbar down the locked window of your body, widens your hips, shoulders, and capacity for pain.

In this, you lose your low-maintenance, your nonchalance. Your newfound body shouts for attention while you cover its mouth.

(It bites.)

Everything you wear becomes a plea for a boy’s attention, not that you’d ever been good at getting, wanting, or maintaining it. You cannot be chill, when you shoot up six inches and your hips poke out the bottom of your t-shirts, cannot be uncaringly feminine while you put on the tightest jeans possible in order to harden your body like quick-dry clay.

(That part of you, at least, is liquid. Unmalleable in its volume and the space it demands to occupy, which seems like more and more the longer you deny it.)

You feel hunger scrape its nails down your stomach and mind in its demand to be felt, feel it like the dry cold of Ottawa, Ontario, in the dead middle of February.

Your cousins take thirds at Christmas dinner. Typical teenage boy appetite.

Being a woman is about the pulling.

(and pulling and pulling and pulling)

And there is an associated pink tax on your existence in the world, in your own home. You put a pillow over your stomach on the couch.

“I’m sorry for being here.”

When you were very young in Catholic school, you’d beg god with a lowercase “g” to make your body smaller, you would lie in bed creating a nest of warmth with your clasped hands and say to your popcorn ceiling that you’d never ask for anything again if you woke up skinny.

You never did. Your belief in god is contingent on the fact that you need something. Champagne atheist, it seems.

When you were fifteen, sixteen, you knew what a roofie tasted like, a little salt to the vodka burning at the back of your throat. You prayed then, too.

(For forgiveness, for salvation, for all the water you drank for the next six months to taste like something other than the burn of his fireball against your salty mouth and the way you’d said I’m not that kind of girl and felt like a bad feminist.)

(Because what is the difference between you and that kind of girl? You imagine her knife is a little sharper than the one burning a hole in your back pocket on the dark walk home.)

Feminine is good, but only if it is quiet and soft. Women in movies learn that their husband has betrayed them and whisper their quiet contempt, drink straight liquor in little silk nightgowns with a cigarette dangling from immaculately lined lips and legs shaved without a nick. Girls stay down when they get hit, no brass knuckles and cracked teeth. The real woman presses a hand neatly against her newly reddened cheek and turns on a heel, walks away. The only good thing a woman ever does is die anyway, every movie needs a dead wife or girlfriend to fuel the protagonist’s insatiable need for revenge turned redemption.

This girl, you know, is the coolest. Death warmed over, after all, is never a good thing. There is no distinction between girl and woman unless intended to maim. “You’re a grown woman, you should’ve known better.” Or “Good girls don’t behave this way.” Good girl, you know, is not synonymous with cool. As famously sung by a boyband on your way to your first sleepover as the sun set over the freezing country sky, “Good girls are bad girls and good girls are bad girls.”

Which is to say, to be a girl who studies at the library and also has sex occasionally is to exist in a Jenkyll and Hyde mythos, in a constant contradiction of yourself. The emancipation of girl from woman, from property of the church to property of the state, is rarely about age. An “It Girl” is usually in her early twenties, crystal girl is nineteen in a job interview, a grown-up woman is eighteen in a courthouse, an “Other woman” crosses the bridge from that kind of girl when a man decides she does.

The separation comes only when it is most beneficial to some third party, a girl is a chameleon to herself only in the shifting infinity mirror dressing rooms that populate shopping malls in which the employees are impossibly thin. There, she can squeeze and pry and knock down walls of hips and curves cutting sharp as white-hot knives.

And a woman is a bowstring and an arrow, pulled back and let go with intention to injure, often landing forgotten in the dirt or lost to the endless rapture of the sky, up and up until she obscures completely from view.

A woman is lost in the alchemy of her creation, both invisible in the tree line and a necessary ache to the fingers that pull her back. A woman is dead in a movie and a book and a workplace. A woman is a prayer, whispered to a ceiling, lost to something bigger than she can understand.

A woman is what you make of her. (Or maybe what you don’t)

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Acadia Currah (she/they) is an essayist and poet residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is a leather-jacket-latte-toting lesbian, and her work seeks to reach those who most need to hear it. Their work has appeared in The Spotlong Review, Defunkt Magazine, Otherworldly Women’s Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Fiddlehead.

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