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| moana (profile) wrote, on 3-22-2004 at 8:14am | |
| I feel heavily sedated. Oh I’m not mind-numb or anything of the sort, no I’m totally aware and conscious. But my body feels like it’s not mine. It’s interesting. It made me happy at first. Then I started to cry. I’ve pictured myself being a lot of places. Not all of them were good. I’ve pictured myself in the gutter, on the streets, lying in a hospital bed, cast out of my own home, helpless on my back in a dark alley. I’ve pictured myself in a lot of places. But I never pictured myself here. I mean here. Here, where genius is disregarded for the sake of blood. Here where just by being born a woman I have forfeited every right granted to man. Here where I cannot escape, yet I cannot stay. It’s scary. I didn’t think my ambitions and dreams would crumble while I’m this sedated. It’s like it’s not happening to me, like it’s someone else. Someone who looks like me, someone who sounds like me, someone who lives like me, but it can’t be me. It just can’t be me who’s going to end up here. I don’t want to believe it. after my doctors appointments and treatments, I asked my mother for a favor: take me to the ministry of higher education, let me ask them what it takes to leave. A delightful woman talked to us. She said things, a lot of things. She said there were no scholarships for political science, especially for women. She said even if I did get a scholarship, got my degree, my country wouldn’t give me a job, not in politics anyway. I told her I would go to the United Nations. She laughed. In the end, she happily advised me to major in either web design, or accounting. I cried. My effort, my life, my dreams, my ambitions, all my plans for the future, and she told me to take a dead end job where I would remain, a dark room with a tiny window, going over the money rich men spend, figuring out if they would be able to afford a new helicopter or not, or making websites for a living, advertising the very evil I loathe. I cried. The car ride home my mother lectured me on weakness. She said with a personality like mine, a weak sniveling little girl like me would never amount to anything. She told me I had to grow up, act my age, stop pretending life is roses and sunshine. The more she lectured the more I cried. I didn’t cry because I was weak or sad, I cried because I was angry. Every other word she reminded me that even if I got an exceptional major and studied it, there was no chance I was living and working abroad. This is my country, this is my home, I was supposed to serve it. I cried. My home doesn’t want me, my country doesn’t want me, yet I still have to stay, pretend I care, work to make the man more money. I didn’t say anything the entire way home. It seemed like an awfully long ride. I’m not weak. I’m just angry. I wanted to yell and scream, ask my mother was she blind? Shake her and drive it through her head, it wasn’t about who I was, it was about who I wanted to be. I don’t want to be rich, I don’t want to be average, I don’t want to die and know the only people that will ever know my name are the people that knew me personally. What about the world? I wanted to ask. What about the rest of the world, they’ll never know me they’ll never hear me speak they’ll never see me smile for them. I’ll live, and I’ll become rich, I will most probably not marry nor bear children, but I will die, and leave the world just as I came into it. I wouldn’t have meant a thing. My existence would be a number, a social security card, a pile of discarded clothes. I never thought I would end up here. When did it happen? | |
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hellborn | 03-22-04 12:19pm You didn't end up there yet, did you?
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