Wheel of Misfortune (America Hates Women)
Alex Bennett, “9.5 min”
by Olivia Biederman
It’s a blessing and a curse to understand your fate. As I gaze through crystal balls, practicing my witchcraft has never seemed so familiar. Reflections appear as if I’m staring into a mirror, instead of my future. It’s not just me I see, but my mother, and my grandmother, and my sister, too.
My father never allowed my mother the relief of a cigarette. I have a lot of trouble sleeping and I stay up late wondering why I had to discover and accept my mother’s addiction before my father ever had to (he still does not know). I was eight years old, waving to my absent, nicotine minded mother through the basement window before I realized she couldn’t see me back.
Not too long ago, I realized that generations were killing my mother and my grandmother and my sister and me. I realized this when my mother said that there was no such thing as a balanced relationship. The only hand-me-down remnants of hope I had vanished in an instant. I was always jealous of my sister whenever she would spend less time with me and more time with a new boyfriend. But I understood. Girls abandon each other to live for men who do not understand them and then cry together with the women who do. Why is that fair?
I reach for validation in men who have never mentioned me to their fathers. I do this because I have never felt as worthy as my brother to my father, except when he wept for me and rubbed my forehead in the hospital. I was sick and dying and I haven’t felt that love since.
Needless to say, there is no man who could love me right. Because there is no man on Earth who will ever understand these emotions and the sacrificial burdens that I have been exposed to and have carried for so long. Their weight unbuttons my spine. Still-- I can not put them down because I am protecting my mother and every woman I know.
My emotions do not run wild. Instead, I’m numb; stuck in a constant state of thawing, waiting for the day I feel something new. What they don’t tell you about girlhood is that it is an endless sequence of secrets. One by one, they line my mind like file shelves, each distinctly assigned to their rightful place within my subconscious. I keep secrets from myself and from everyone I meet. Sometimes I can’t see through this haze, and my mind plays tricks on me so that I lose track of these secrets, and my file room disappears into nothingness, encrypting my mind into an endlessly sorrowful, hollow abyss.
I am misunderstood, misdirected, and misanthropic. America is wasting me.