So, Are We an Item?

Western women are set out to destroy my peace of mind!

I found a peace, a deep calm, within myself and even in delicate harmonious balance with the complexity of another human being. But that doesn't matter. What matters is, "Are you guys an item now?" An item? Isn't an item something you buy or purchase for personal satisfaction, often to fulfill some need that the media has convinced you of?

"No," I hesitantly responded, realizing in that moment wherefrom stems such torment in my life. Are we really this? Beneath the exterior, are they even serious either? Are we meant to label and downsize and organize and order anything of significance until nothing is left but the outline, the mere frame of what so gloriously stood in its place before? We strangle the very thing we need.

The anxious women before me lowered their eyes when I said this, which means they pitied me. I had failed. Never mind the truth, which was that something so much more profound than being an "item" was at hand that I couldn't have dared utter the words. They were sacred. And losing them to the air of this strange, unforgivable audience seemed an injustice. An item. They look away. Poor her. She failed to capture the "man" as though capturing a man and folding the laundry are the birth rights of any woman, both to be done with the same care and methodical nonethingness of soul. Not to fold the laundry, well, means you've moral unravelling that is to be silently scorned. And not capturing the man, as though he were an "item" to be picked up at the local grocers for dinner that night, is worse.

If I could have spoken my mind, it would have been, "Mind your own business and don't meddle in affairs that you cannot possibly understand!" Instead my eyes flipped reverse into my interior, and I stared at my heart as it beat in fear of retribution from my whole gender. I realized nothing honest would satisfy them. "It's, uhh..." Do I say more than that, more than "item" level? More complicated? Oh, complicated is female code for, "I have low self-esteem and am so desperate for a man that I will take anything." Do I say we have a secret between us, and I am forbidden to tell anyone? That's female code for, "I'm in total denial, and we are never getting married. He will never propose." It also sounds arrogant. So, I stumbled through words, searching for an elusive truth, but nothing seemed enough. I tried. A little. "We're... uh... like best friends, you know, I cannot understand how.... uh.... an item? Well... he's... we're.... neither of us fit boxes... uh... we're eccentric (Damn it! Too much information! Don't give 'em the eccentric word! The secret is almost out! Shut up!) So I shut up. Then looked away. Changed the subject. They feel sorry for me now, me the poor fool who doesn't know she's worth a man who will buy her roses and propose within a reasonable timeframe.

But here is the fate of a woman grown up in Western culture. If you say the man has proposed, they grab your hand. They pull it under their scrutinizing eyes and determine in that moment alone the full value and worth of your essence as a woman, therefore as a human being, as anything. Secretly they think you could have done better if it's too small, or they suspect the man knows something they don't: something that makes you only 1/2 carat worthy. And if it's huge, then the same illogic flows in mirror reverse.

By the way, want to know the size of my diamond? See slave child below....

How about this. How about this! We don't know what we are doing here! Not on earth! Not breathing! Not living or any of it! We cannot assign value to something we cannot understand!

And yet, we know. We know it all. These distractions. Do they mean the truth is too much to face?

I just broke free from some cultural programming, and I guess now it's time to face the reality, which is that others haven't broken that program, and I will have to learn how to deal with this.

So, do they want to know the truth? Three words: deep heart peace.

No further questions, please. Envy that, bitches, cause I bet my own ass not a single one of you've got it. Why the desperate prying? Hungry much? Restless much?

Fuck off.