He made you this way, made you to be a temple but forgot who was buried under the foundation he built you on. unstable and shifting, your walls began to crack before you were even fully formed. you are not worthy of His love anymore. so you crawled into His abandoned shrine, and made it your home. slowly rebuilt yourself in an image all your own. you no longer hear His voice calling to you. it is only you out here. It is only you. You alone.
__
you dig up the ground he once laid you on and throw in the body of man you’d never met. feel something like empathy for him. you know what it’s like to have your body used in the name of love. bury him right, turn your back, go home.
__
gaze upon her and fall to your knees. thank her for the feast she has prepared you. crawl to her and take her in your mouth. Grace, here your holy sacrament. if you truly believe, if you are a man of faith, wait until she cries out. listen for the name you’d long forgotten. wait until she trembles. hold her down. restrained on the bed, high off the ground. don’t let her touch the earth you dug your way through. turn away from the you, you were and think nothing of it. those sins were never as sweet as her, your one and only. pray to the name she won’t let you call her in the sun. worship right. make her your divine. she is yours for the night.
I see many Winnie the Poohs at the hospital (aka Winnie aka Pooh aka Pooh Bear), as you may guess. Many look like this, a bit flat and with small wounds, designed to have a removable shirt:
They come for spas:
New hearts and stuffing:
And plumping up so they have a proper belly again:
Sometimes they look like this:
A bit more loved… or as his person said, in more “desperate condition”.
He also had a spa (not everyone does):
As you may’ve noticed, he needed a new nose and there were several options:
His heart had a pooh on it as well as some magic from a heffalump:
And after a bit of arm and smile surgery, soon he was healthy and ready to fly home:
His person wrote “He looks wonderful!”
The final Pooh I’m going to show you today just flew home yesterday. He is always called Pooh Bear. He is 14 years old and showed every year of hugs.
Here are the photos his person’s mom sent for diagnosis:
As you can see, Pooh Bear was a bit flat and a bit gray. He came in for a spa:
Got new stuffing and a magical Heffalump heart to preserve a bit of his original stuffing:
And finally was clean and plump and fluffy and ready to fly home:
He could even sit on his own! His people said his chubbiness was perfect and as I said, he flew home yesterday!
“he scoffs and says, “well, if it was such a big deal,
she should have said something
when it happened.” there is a girl i know
who wakes up screaming and can’t drink coffee with cream because
it reminds him of how he smelled
and when she talks of that night
she shakes so hard that she can’t finish a sentence there is a girl i know who was dating her rapist and lost most of her friends when she told them
because they said that she was being unfair to him, that men
have needs (and the need of a woman
to feel safe, to her own body - it is unimportant) there is a girl i know who
can’t speak about it because
she was six at the time of the assaults and to this day she sometimes calls me
just to ask: “am i making this up?” there is a boy i know who will never tell anyone
and you know exactly why we were dressed wrong, we shouldn’t have walked, we
know better than to take a cab at night, we shouldn’t have
smiled at him, we should have just smiled back, we should have
told him yes, we shouldn’t have flirted with him, we led him on,
we were too frosty, we were making it up for attention, we were
lucky for it, we were too confident, we were too small it made us
a target, we shouldn’t have been alone, we should know better
than leaving our drinks unattended, we are sluts, we
are one in four women which means if you can name five of us,
you probably know at least one - in your classes, in the supermarket, in the hallway, on your
way to work we are making it up. our stories overlap into one large tapestry,
one web of solidarity, one statistical anomaly that says less than three percent are faked and out of the ones accused,
only three percent are convicted (which means of course
ninety-seven out of a hundred rapists get away with it)
and if you think that’s not your problem think about the men you know and then think about the one in four women - the ninety-seven
percent has to come from some part of the population
so chances are, you know someone who hurt a human being
and might not even realize it because it’s a little problem. it’s just an instinct. it’s a loud complaint because women are hysteric. women with
our higher pain tolerance - we are weak. sure, it happens
but when it happens to us, it might as well not have happened
at all. there is no justice for us. you know why we don’t speak up?
we become dirty attention-seekers, become vicious,
become seen as lacking humanity. we don’t speak up because
there won’t be support for us and we know better
than to put ourselves on trial. my mother once said to me: welcome to being a woman,
they will occasionally blame you
just for living.”
“You tell yourself it’s easier this way. That sitting alone on your old red couch on a Saturday night rewatching his favorite episode of a show you never even liked is okay because at least you can’t get hurt this way. And then you wear his Led Zeppelin shirt to bed and you tell yourself it’s because you forgot to do laundry this week. A shitty excuse, but it’ll do. It doesn’t smell like him anymore - it’s been three months, after all - but it was never really about that, was it? His arms have been here. In this bed, wrapped around your waist after another fight about something stupid like dirty dishes. And by dirty dishes I mean everything you’re too afraid to actually talk about. “Is it ever going to get easier?“ you asked later that night. "Probably not,” he said. His arms. This shirt. That bed. “But I love you.“ As if it could ever be enough. You tell yourself it never would have worked, and you’re probably right. He was always thirty minutes late, and you were always trashing your co-workers over the low-carb dinners of your newest health kick. He’d push each bite around the plate and wait until you took that work call you promised to ignore next time to sneak a piece of cold pizza from the back of the fridge. But then he showed up in the freezing rain at your first half marathon with a sign that made you laugh in the middle of shin splints and numb toes. You don’t even remember what it said, but you remember that you’d only been dating a month at the time, that you’d mentioned the race in passing- once, maybe twice - and that he’d lifted you up at the finish line and in the thrill and sweat and confusion of it all, you told him you loved him. “Do you love me?” you asked in the shower three years later. The day you lost the job you hated and took it out on him for hours. He kneeled before you and pulled you close by the knees. Water so hot it burned your back. You swore you heard him whisper, “So much it hurts.” And now you tell yourself to stop. Stop it. Stop thinking about him and the beginning and the end. You tell yourself it’s easier this way. That you can’t hurt each other like this. Your pride and his anger. His ex and your god damn career. You tell yourself you both going to be ok - better, even - without each other and sometimes you listen. Sometimes, you even find a way to believe yourself.”
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
