Quiver

Pretty Girls

"But you're so pretty!" she said.
So who am I judge the men who rolled down their windows to yell obscenities? 
Blame not the whistles from their mouths, it's their biology 
God, it must be so hard, to not have every minor you desire, it's not your fault poor boy, it's in your nature to desire
From a summer night in a Spanish street when his eyes saw through my skin, back when I was still too young to know the future to begin. A gaze that reached through and poured his sickness on my soul, their lives must surely be so dull if I am who they pick. It's just how they are, it's impolite to call them pricks. And yet their calls stayed with me.
An entitlement to what I must surely want, but surely must be because I am so pretty. So gorgeous in the yellow dress on the Spanish street or in the four layers of clothes in front of the ice cream store or wearing shorts in front of a church when it was ninety degrees. An entitlement to me. I must love that they do it, I'll bet they think that way, that I must be in denial when I say they're not everything I crave.
They can't help that I must be so stunning, a child running from the teenagers that entered the parking lot, crossing fingers as a guy friend tells them I love women not knowing what I've been signed up for, not knowing how they'll persist and beg I prove it, loving that I am young and loving that I don't love them. My identity must be a challenge and I am no more than something to win. It's not their fault I'm so inviting.
My mother never stops telling me I am pretty, and her flowery language turns my inside rotten, the insides of a body born to never be mine. It leaves a residue on my skin that I've been trying to scrub off since I was seven, trying so hard to be anything but what she tells me I am, trying to detox myself of the shame and disgust that killed my childhood. Her words are not a compliment, only a symbol that I have and will be used, a symbol that I must want it because pretty girls must solely long to be sexualized and degraded by men because that is all we are and all we can be.