As it always seems to favor in one way or another the man is always the winner. In my life I’ve only seen men get away with what they want. I remember one night I was on a taxi after a party and the driver wanted to give me back my change and put a hand on my knee. Of course I did not move, of course I didn’t even plan on making any noises or actually just anything. The same image of the taxi driver, this old, black dude who tried to pick up conversation about the weather but I was too busy drunk tweeting about how much I hated men, he rises to my head each time I lose. Anything. Even if I lose change or a plastic bag. Doesn’t matter. Because he wasn’t trying to harass me, he wasn’t trying to abuse me. Rob me. Anything. He was taking advantage of me. That minute there I understood that fear has kept us undertow our whole lives, living prisoners of whatever we chose to subdue ourselves too. Maybe it’s a question of power, I get it, but it gets kinda tedious to always have to be fighting against men. Against other people who teach you that the best way to treat a man is to make them think they had your idea. Never be too smart. I was never good at handling that. I was never good at hiding my disdain for defeat. My feet never stood still on the ground when another man tried to take over. And when I say men I’m talking about them. About them. Those who rise in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror and see nothing but a lack of bilateral symmetry. Those who ignore their mothers, become jealous of their sister’s boyfriend, and make up rumors about their classmates’ sex lives. Those guys who sound their car horns at you when you walk by just to say hi. I’m talking about them, the infamous strictly conservative dudes who believe that same-sex marriage is okay but still “kinda weird” to call yourself a woman if you have a penis, or take it as an insult if someone tells them they do anything “like a girl”. I guess you’ve seen them. We all have. I’m still thinking if the taxi driver had been one of them too.
Growing older doesn’t seem to foster wisdom. Actually what seems to flourish each time is boredom. We all reach a certain age with soaring levels of stress and phobias. We’re scared, not of the dark, but of silence. On an elevator, on a bus. When the other person doesn’t text. When your job application e-mail isn’t responded to yet. When your kid hasn’t texted he’s back home safe. We’re doomed by these small details, these tiny moments of unkindness that teach us to grow just a little bit stronger. We find ourselves decorating agendas to the fullest just in case they ever appear to be empty. Emptiness would only set the path to boredom, what we actually just seem to reject at all levels. With age you kind of learn to accept that boredom and make it yours. The realization that our bodies our only vessel on this journey and we must learn to live with it, no matter the cost or how hard it might seem, is glorious. Even when bodies grow stronger than our will and develop auto-inmune diseases. Even then, we need to learn to live our bodies and prepare ourselves for possible boredom.