no

and a warning

dear every woman still breathing,

i am the girl they sang about for four hundred years, the one who walked into the river because words got too heavy. they painted me with flowers in my hair and called it beautiful. they forgot the water was cold, forgot i couldn’t swim, forgot i was trying to wash the voices off, not join them.

i want you to know i didn’t die for love. i died because no one believed my “no” was a complete sentence. because the man i trusted repeated my own sentences back to me until they sounded foreign. because the only room i was allowed to stand in was the corner of someone else’s story, and even that corner shrank daily.

they made my pain a decoration. they put my breakdown to music. they sold tickets to the scene where i lose my mind, and they called it poetry while i was still bleeding out reeds.

so here is what i need to say to you who still has a heartbeat and bills and a boss who stands too close:

your “no” is enough, even if it wobbles. even if you say it through tears. even if you have to whisper it the first fifty times. say it anyway. say it until your own ears believe it. say it for me, because i never got to finish mine.

you are allowed to be angry without being pretty-weeping. you are allowed to scream without sounding like a song. you are allowed to walk away from anyone who treats your mind like a playground they can trash and leave.

if the day comes, when the ceiling presses down and the air feels thick, when the mirror shows you a stranger wearing your clothes, pick up the phone, pick up keys, pick up shoes, whatever you can grab and leave. the river is not your only exit. the river was never meant to be an exit. i promise there are roads, buses, friends’ couches, hotlines, night shifts, morning walks, cheap coffee, second-hand coats, all waiting to keep you here.

i would trade every bouquet laid on my fake grave for one more afternoon of your ordinary breathing. for one more grocery trip where you buy yourself a candy bar just because. for one more episode of bad tv you watch with the sound too loud and no one asking you to turn it down.

i am not a symbol. i am a warning. and warnings are useless if no one changes the wiring. so change it. leave the room that shrinks. leave the man who cuts off your sentences. leave the idea that your pain has to look graceful to count.

stay alive, stay loud, stay difficult if that’s what safety requires. stay soft, stay gentle, stay easy if that’s what you need. just stay.

the water was cold, but your blood is warm. keep it that way. walk on land. walk into offices, into voting booths, into classrooms, into kitchens, into whatever space you choose, and do not apologize for taking up room.

i am walking with you, barefoot and dripping, cheering every step you take away from the edge they wrote for me.

with all the fury i never got to finish,

ophelia

writer of the day: Jasmine Leann

mimi