my stomach isn’t flat

a woman is a fictional character

i have been written by a man.

all that i am expected to be has been etched into my face by a man. when you look at me, those are the words you are reading. even if you don’t want to. even if you are a man who knows better, your choices often reveal to us all what you prefer to read.

a flat woman.

a woman you can describe with a pen and paper. a muse who requires no musing. a woman you can discern with an instant thought, requiring nothing more of you than shallow meditation. nothing more than reflections in a shallow pool near the ocean. a woman with no waves. flat. interesting only in her existence before your eyes, with nothing behind her own. a woman who sees the sky as blue, the grass as green, and you as a god above her. you—a man who believes he ripped out his own rib and created women, himself. that’s what you like in a woman, the parts that you believe you have written yourself.

a woman is a fictional character,

and i have been written by a man who writes bad poetry and listens to demons on each shoulder.

flat, one-dimensional, easy to manipulate.

a woman you’ve poorly imagined and poorly written. a woman who fits into a single paragraph on a 6x9 page. a woman i never agreed to be. all that a woman can be, you have rendered down to a flat stomach, and

my stomach isn’t flat.

yet,

you

like

me

anyway.

you struggle with your desire for a woman you haven’t written. a woman who isn’t flat. a woman who defies the words carved into her forehead. rather than love me, you turn me into a character to be studied, one that shouldn’t exist, because you haven’t figured out how to put me on paper.

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my stomach isn’t flat.

it was when i was younger, when i was flat. we like to think we’ve always been interesting, but there’s an inherent flatness to youth. when we’re young, we always think we’re smarter than we are, cooler than we are, more interesting than we are. clever only in our delusions, as we’re passing notes with thoughts and feelings the women before us have already penned. as we transition into womanhood, we look back at girlhood lovingly embarrassed at our arrogance. because we know, now. now that we are older, undulating women. as we get older, if even under the surface, we are a collection of haunted objects and secrets. we have more depth, more hidden places, more desires, more volume. there is an ocean beneath my skin, i jiggle when i walk, and men have been taught to fear open water.

as a woman, there’s always the pressure to lose ten pounds. there’s always the pressure to be less, to take up less space, to flatten myself. in dating men, my dimensionality has deemed me unlovable. i cannot be more than a girl in a woman’s body, because a man didn’t write me that way. i should be no more than twelve inches wide, my voice should be light and unsure, and you should be able to see my bones through my skin. my stomach should be flat, my breasts should not look as if they’ve carried milk, and my mind should be empty—flat—ready to be filled with the half-thought philosophies of a man.

“the world is flat”, an ironically popular philosophy of many men—men who prefer women who don’t know any better.

a woman has been written with the characteristics of a child, rather than a partner. a woman who still needs to be taught her left from her right is preferred over a woman who already knows when to be on your left and when to be on your right. a woman who is competent to stand next to you, a woman who doesn’t need to be taught how to hold your hand. yet, competent women have rooms in their heart full of rejection. i wish i could fall to my knees and worship myself at the altar, arrogantly, as if i am a rare creature, but there’s no shortage of non-flat women. and, because competence is undesirable in this male-generated flat epidemic, we are often unmarried. but, not unwanted.

what is often interpreted as a man’s inconsistency is actually his confusion and disdain for his attraction to a woman who isn’t flat. a man is often more attached to his ideals of a woman on paper, than a woman in person. he likes you, he just doesn’t like that he likes you. because he didn’t write you. because you’re not flat. many non-flat women will watch a man marry a woman he barely likes, often a woman he barely knows—a flat woman he can easily comprehend. and still, itching with under-stimulation, he’ll find any reason to escape the flat world that he’s created.

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i recently binged sex and the city (related).

i had never seen a single episode of satc prior, because i prefer not to watch shows with a cast painfully lacking black characters (aside from the “i date black people, too” episode), and it wasn’t on netflix. however, i endured through each episode, not identifying with any of the characters, until season three.

in summary (spoilers ahead),

as Carrie was silently praying every night to be chosen by Big, he was choosing someone else—a flat woman named Natasha. a woman younger and flatter than Carrie. after years of telling Carrie that he wasn’t the marrying kind, within months, he was engaged and ready to be married to Natasha. internet men with podcast mics would have you believe that you, a non-flat woman, just weren’t the one. but, no. Big hated his flat world. after marrying his flat, young, Ralph Lauren model, Big was craving to talk to a woman with layers, to be with a woman with waves—Carrie. so much so, that Big and Carrie began to have an affair. skipping over details, this led to Big and Natasha’s divorce. but even after he set his flat world ablaze to be back at the feet of a non-flat woman, Big would not stand at the altar next to Carrie.

competence is undesirable, but not unwanted. he likes you, he just doesn’t like that he likes you. in your divine creation, you are a constant reminder that he isn’t God. men prefer to live in flat worlds of their own design, where typographically complex women are treated as footnotes. i watched a man i used to love marry a flat woman, a woman he barely knew, and use me for stimulation masked as friendship. non-flat women are wanted for our wisdom, our resources, our partnership, our competence, our personalities, but not our hand in marriage. we are often used as stepping stools for men and their flat wives to stand on.

i don’t completely see myself in Carrie, she did many things i would never do. although, i would like to see myself in her shoe collection. but, i saw myself here. in the pain of watching someone you know loves you, pretend they don’t, because you’re not simpler. in receiving the phone calls and the texts of a man looking to indulge his senses in a non-flat woman, just to give another woman all of the benefits. if i were Carrie, i would’ve lived happily ever after with Aidan (if i had an Aidan).

non-flat women get used to being used for our parts. when someone wants to actually love us, we often don’t know what to do. we get used to being stuck on the counter, where a man has put us. where a man is saving us for later, after he goes through all of his flat options. where a man is forcing you to watch as he tries to love anyone but you. only when he couldn’t have Carrie, did Big want her. but Aidan knew right away and never wavered.

we’re often not used to a decisive man. a man who chooses us from the beginning. no tricks, no emotional unavailability, no puzzles, no waiting. what you see with Carrie is that in loving emotionally unavailable men, we often become emotionally unavailable, ourselves. and, in a twisted cycle of flatness, we begin to seek a man just as they have written us—flat. Big was never interesting—he was inconsistent, de-stablizing, and flat. and here is a curly-haired, fashionable, youthful, non-flat woman, sacrificing her integrity, her self-esteem, and her sense of stability for a man who’s no more interesting than a paragraph on a page.

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my stomach isn’t flat,

and you are a fool’s god.

my body flows like rivers and you must drink at my feet.

you yearn to bathe in the richness of my skin, to plant your seed in rolling hills, for my favor to purify your blood for generations.

yet,

you carry my water away to flat lands of your own pen and curse God for fruitlessness.

only right in your own eyes, fool!

i am a woman no man can write.

source: juno calypso

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