Category

Simply sweetly beautiful

Pushed to be boxed in to a label
Time table of colored charts and graphs
The stuff that sense is made of
I have no category for you to file me away under
You think you own me
My voice
My body

You press your hands around my face and stare into my complexion like you’re looking at some new prize you won.
You think this is gratifying to me.
Like my main goal in life was to make a man feel so proud I was near him and that I was born with the way my hair falls around my face, or the color of my skin, or the weight in my shoes, or the shortness in my style of dress.
Only to please the kind of man that craves what I have between my legs rather than what I have between my ears.
You think I am simply beautiful

Simply sweetly beautiful
Simply that woman
Simply kind
Simply sweet
Simply quiet
Simply her

Simply anything you can put your name on like tagging a redwood tree in the park
I start to think you want to carve your name on my skin
But I have an issue with wearing another person’s letters on my chest

I am not your pushpin, dolled up princess in the tower baby girl who needs a man, to climb out a fucking window and scale the vines down the wall.

I am simply NOT

I am amazing
And I am terrifying
I am creative and passionate and vibrant and broken and strong and wonderfully not caring that this list is long.
It should be long.
Everyone’s should be long.
I am kind, and forgiving, I am stubborn but understanding, I am a leader, a follower, a healer and a fighter. I will not give up on you and though it only takes one to me fall, it’s just one to pick myself back up. I will support you, protect you and hold you but I will not
Let you take away what I am and put me in that
Simply sweet box
Full of colored graphs and stuff meant for sensible days
Categorize me as anything that can fit on a label

I am extravagant-ly
Tired of hearing you talk about
My eyes
And
How you can’t bear to think that any man has ever hurt me
Let me turn that around

I am not a victim

I have stories in my scars but I am not afraid to cry in the dark

I am not ASHAMED
Not anymore of who I was and what they did

I am imperfectly perfect
Not simply, just good
I am me
Not that the storybook character you always thought one day you’d meet
That princess who’s voice you can’t get enough of and who’s heart you’re sure is meant to be yours.

I am not going to meet your expectations
I’ll give you new ones.

I’ll never be simple
Nor silent or sound

I’ll always be faithful
To one heart
One skin
One name

I am me
Simply

And not at all

-ELEANOR HASTINGS