Had an epiphany in the past day or two. How older ladies become cat ladies. I know why it happens now.
Because as women get older their level of “I don’t give a fuck” increases. This isn’t just because they’re older but because of getting to a hormonal maturity does change women’s personalities to where they 1. Have a different sense of the expectation from society, i.e. aren’t young and attractive therefore of no further use, 2. Just tired of taking shit from anyone.
We all know who is more demanding, dogs or cats? Well cats of course. So it makes perfect sense that as women’s levels of toleration of stupidity levels go down that their love of an undemanding companion goes up.
So therefore, women of COURSE become crazy old cat ladies as they grow older. They are tired of spending their entire existences only to be used and depended on and worked to death by others. They prefer a more independent sidekick (or five of them).
And because they’re no longer demanded upon to look a certain way because women over 50 are pretty damned invisible to society, they can relax and be themselves and have as many cats as they want to.
Is still so hard for me. It was our love language, how we ached for one another, how we wooed, preened one another’s feathers. My eyes flutter shut when I remember the smell and taste of her under me while we listened to our love story playlist. How she would call me “Grasshopper”. How it made me blush every time.
Music was our love language in how we’d sway in tune with each other in the kitchen, touching each other’s hair in passing, our hips brushing each other until electricity sizzled between us. How she’d pull me in for a kiss. How I’d rest my head on her shoulder. How safe I felt closing my eyes with her.
I’d pore over new music releases and send her my favorites from that day. She’d play them for me again when we rode in her truck together, singing them to me. I’d know then she listened to them over and over again, that they belonged to “Us” now, that we’d never hear them again without feeling that exact moment. The fresh breeze scented with hay as we sailed down the highway. The way she’d catch me watching her. How I loved to make her feel beautiful. Handsome. How it felt my heart was out there, walking on two legs beside me.
We were our music. We were the swells and rolling melodies, we were the dancing with fire spinning under starlight to our favorite songs. We were the pounding of the beat as we drove to one another from our separate homes. We were the lyrics we got wrong and right again and sang wrong anyway. We were the pulsing throbbing of our heartbeats until we couldn’t hold them in anymore and they spilled out with the happiness of it all, wetting our cheeks. We were so lucky to have one another, the angels looked down at us and sighed “At last”.
The last time I drove away from her it took three days. I stopped listening to our music. I didn’t notice how silent the days were until my mind paused for a moment and let me breathe, and suddenly I couldn’t get enough air inside me. I gulped like I was famished, there wasn’t enough. If I stop to think I still can’t. When I listen to music I’m drowning. Leaning against a wall because I can’t hold myself up anymore I’m sinking standing straight remembering her shoulders and how they taste. How she’d hum beneath her breath without knowing. How her every movement was a song playing so I only could hear it.
I let myself listen to music today. I found a new artist, even. I got excited about her voice and her message. I listened and cried for the joy of it.
My entire existence I’ve been told “a woman’s sexual prime is in her 40’s…I looked forward to feeling that rush, that high, of being there. Feeling more myself than ever. Having a confidence I couldn’t have imagined before. Of being seen by others in a light I never had.
In many ways most of those things have come to pass. Well, most. But what they don’t tell you is that you remain the same inside. Sort of. It’s really damn odd to know I’m the same person who needed to be liked so much that I lost myself for eleven years in a marriage I should never have been in. Who drank so much because I was miserable in the cult I was raised in. Who chose the marriage and cult over and over again until my body chose for me and said ENOUGH.
Similar to when my body chose sobriety after pouring my last drink and looking at it and knowing I could never swallow that poison again. I didn’t choose the struggle and I didn’t choose almost dying from withdrawals. My body did. It knew when to stop, and didn’t let me go further.
It’s doing it again. It’s choosing what it should have so long ago. As my concerns about the thoughts of others fall away my body is deciding what it really needs and wants, and after so many years of being over-sexualized it’s choosing the opposite.
Instead of falling into bed and having raucous tumbles a woman in her sexual prime should have I’m turning within. In the almost three years since leaving the woman I saw as my Stardust I’ve pulled farther and farther from desiring to be seen as someone highly sexual. Even being in the kink world doesn’t change things. For me kink has never had anything to do with sex anyway. My intimacy is of a different breed entirely.
This change of self stems, I think, from a lifetime of being nothing more than a plaything for men. Of dressing for the male gaze. Of keeping my hair long because I once overheard my father lamenting that “it’s so sad that women cut their hair when they grow older”. I had sworn to keep my hair long from that day and didn’t cut it until 30 years later. Then started to grow it back out the year I turned 40. Then shaved the sides again.
No longer do I wear shoes that kill my feet just because they’re high-heeled and elegant. The decades of wearing panty-hose to church meetings four days a week are far behind me. My bras aren’t the terribly uncomfortable lacy contraptions that make my breasts perky and unweildy and impossible to ignore.
Makeup has stuck with me, though. It’s my war paint of choosing and makes me feel powerful. I line my blue eyes with black and streak my lips and cheeks red because they make me feel strong and honor my grandmothers, many generations back. Red to remember my fallen and taken sisters. Red like the blood of the men whose necks I’d open if they ever laid hands on me again.
I dress as I please, in fabrics that don’t offend my skin and make me want to claw them away because they’re too bright and colorful and make it impossible to fade into the background. Wildcats don’t like to be seen.
I mark my skin with art and pierce it when and where I please because it is mine and mine alone. At last. And I don’t have to listen to anyone saying “men don’t like girls with lots of tattoos and piercings”, and if they dare say it I laugh with my eyes wide open and teeth bared to frighten them back into their shells because how dare they even pretend they are more than the snails I know them to be.
My body is my own and I will not share it with anyone again unless it is MY idea and MY desire and it all originates with ME, not someone else’s attraction telling me what I “should” do.
Instead of reaching out and having encounters with humans and the “best sex of my life” I’m reclaiming what envelops me and inspires me. This beautiful, odd, one-of-a-kind existence in this body that has never been and never will again, yet is made up of all the life that came before. The person my ancestors didn’t know to dream of because they simply couldn’t.
I am remarkable and I am mine and my body doesn’t exist to please others by doing what it “should do” in my 40’s, because I’m in the prime of my life and that means I am finally my own.
Four years ago today My body quit For me For no one else It decided I couldn’t Not one more sip For me It died a thousand little deaths So I could live.
Happy Soberversary to me, to my body, and rebirth.
We all dream of ourselves…especially when we dream of houses, or places we live.
I’ve several places I return to in my dreams repeatedly.
One is a wild spring that feeds into a river and every time I dream of it it’s different. Sometimes it’s being overrun by destructive humans.
Sometimes it’s wild and free.
Sometimes people are just discovering it and in the beginning moments of running it over with their trash and footprints.
I cry and scream to save it, to make it disappear into wilder places no person has a right to visit. I break my own heart with the battle of it all, and wake with leaking eyes.
I’ve places with huge old growth trees as big around as my house.
My grandparents home, but in a dream not in life. Different.
And I almost always can fly in my dreams.
When I was younger, it was difficult to fly. I pressed against the winds, arched my back and neck, strained my arms and legs to remain aloft. I could never get very high, rarely above the height of a one story building. It was hard and my arms in my sleep wouldn’t push as hard as they needed to get me higher.
I’d fly to nightmarish landscapes, be taunted by the dead or dying, be followed by evil horrific men capable of monstrosities.
When I drank myself to sleep every day I didn’t dream. It was blessed black and blank oblivion. But I missed flying. So much.
Four years into sobriety and now I attain heights I’d never been able to when I was younger. I don’t strain, flight is much easier to achieve, the winds hold me close and bring me to the bellies of clouds, through the arms of sunshine, kissing the tops of trees, lips to leaves.
I left the cult I was raised in ten years ago now, over ten years actually, and my nightmares have disappeared. No longer am I chased in horror by disgusting men who bid me harm. By spectres of mistakes and misery begging me for peace. They have gone now.
In dreams I try to reclaim my family, the home I built with my parents, but I am refused even entry. Even when I can see in the windows and see it’s abandoned, they won’t let me wander its halls. I walked away from it willingly long ago and have no rights to it anymore.
And nightmares have no rights to me. I am my own. I belong to my Self, to the trees as big around as a skyscraper, to the winds who I speak to in the waking world, and how they do listen. They’ve known me since I was a child singing to them before the cult beat my spirit into submission. They know my true name, play with my hair when I step outside. I hear them call me through the leaves of trees and sand storms.
The waking world isn’t so far from the dreaming, after all. We only think there is a distinction between the two, but they are one and the same. They reflect one another in every plane of consciousness, if we but look.
A Burd in Flight 