No Such Thing as Crying for No Reason: Or: What is the male equivalent of the word CUNT?

I’m not sure exactly when I started internalizing things. And by internalizing, I mean absorbing deep in my tissues and glands, storing, becoming, symbiotic, like certain parasites certain pain that I could not place anywhere else.

I thought I’d become impervious.

I thought things bounced off me like child rhyme rubber.

I am not even glue.

I am a sponge that has been used too long, mildewing around the edges with pieces chunking off into the sink, leaving a sordid stink lingering on the counter.

I don’t know when it started, but I know by the end of high school, I was working on hardening myself to aches and pains. What do I care if my best friend Rob thinks he can offer me cds to sleep with his friends? I tell him that is a fucked up thing to ask me and it ends there. I believe it does not taint our relationship from then on out. I pretend it has nothing to do with the fact that I later cheat on him when we are dating. I pretend I don’t hate him for this and other crimes (it took me weeks of arguments and finally a short story to convince him that rape is wrong, and just because “penises go in vaginas” doesn’t mean rape has been overblown. Oh sure, he’d never rape a woman, but he didn’t understand the big deal), and because I believe the lie, I am surprised when I cheat. Surprised when his tears and cries only make me feel tired over the long distanced wires.

I somehow came to expect such things from men. Each and every time, I am not surprised, or if I am, only for a few moments, before it makes sense, before it seems inevitable. The boyfriends who have slept with whores and laugh because one of their friends, a huge guy, laid on a whore and wouldn’t get off because she had the nerve to ask him to take a shower before fucking her. The boyfriends who have anal fisting pr0n on their geeky computers and insist that you can’t help what gets you off. Then men who talk about other women in bed with me, the ones they obsess over, who won’t have anything to do with them. Vulcanized rubber. It bounces off. I don’t care. What else would I expect?

MEN.

I surrounded myself with men when I was younger, annoyed with girls and their clothes and make-up and boytalk, things that didn’t interest me. I injected myself into a world that did not want me, and I had to negotiate an unhappy truce with myself: in order to be one of the guys, you have to be desexed and listen to “guy talk” without becoming upset. Tell me all about the ass rating scale you devised for the girls at school, and who is a ten and who is only an eight. Nothing will register on my face. Discuss how there should be a law mandating all people must be allowed to lost their virginity by the time they are 18, and if you are still a virgin at 18, any woman you ask must agree to sleep with you.

I took it all in and didn’t put it anywhere. Each raunchy comment, a new mite or tick, a larvae planted in places I refused to feel.

I was afraid to leave. I was afraid not to know what men think about women. I was afraid of losing the privileges associated with being almost male, one of the guys. I wanted to ride bikes and play video games and do boy stuff. It’s not as if they talked about women all the time. Of course not. The remarks were usually casual, offhand, intermittent, and each time, I grew a little harder against those comments and ideas about women in my mind, even as I was dissolving. For a brief period of time, I became a borderline misogynist, so sure that I was happy on the other side of the fence, that I had broken the rules of the game and other women should come along or quit their bitching.

I was delusional.

I am paying for all of this and more now, on days when it’s an effort to move from my computer to the sink. Days when my minds feels sharded and nebulous and I just don’t know what’s wrong.

I do know what’s wrong.

The toxins have reached critical mass. The worms have multiplied and are wiggling out my ears and ass. My liver is covered with ticks. My lungs are full of mites. I am decaying from within.