At 14 I was a bird-killer.
They had brought in this bird—only a baby, really, just learning to fly when some cat or fox tore its wing to an uncanny angle. It hopped around in the flimsy cardboard box they found, its impossible toothpick legs trying to get itself free but finding walls on every side, trying to spread its wings but finding it is helpless with just one. Its chirps were sharp and shrill, so fast and scared and nervous—god, your heart couldn't help but break for it.
And we couldn't do anything about it, no one we could turn to and nowhere help could come from. And the bird—the bird was in pain, it was clear for anyone to see! They talked about putting it back outside, but out there, anything could get to it. It couldn't fly away—it couldn't fight or hide or defend itself. Wolves go after the injured, the weak—it would have been gone by morning, feathers strewn all over that cardboard box.
It was a kindness, a mercy—a hunger, too, a dangerous one—my teeth bared and hands aching, pinning its flapping wings down as it struggled to break free and me, there, the cause of its swift destruction. Wolves hold their jaws over life and death, spanning the divide as the bearers of a slow and painful death. Their teeth tear through muscle and sinew as the poor bastard lives on still, bleeding out, panic rising as their body knows they are about to die. Was I more merciful?
Life and death in my hands, and for a moment, I was drunk with the power of it.
It was only a play.
It was only a play about the Vietnam War, all blood and guts and brotherhood, strange for four girls, right? I was the angry one, the spiteful one, the bird-killer, when the bird was a bit of air in an empty cardboard box, made real in my mind. When they cast me in the role, they said—it's strange, it feels as though there's something more behind your eyes, some kind of darkness.
It almost made me laugh, that moment, some sad grin on my face because they were right. In that moment, they saw me, up late at night, unable to breathe, crying silently in my room because no one must know how terrified and sad I was, how insatiably sad I was.
And I said what I thought I should say, I said that I felt bad yelling and swearing, but every time I screamed, spit flying, lungs aching, mind blank churning out the words I knew I had to say—something wild grew out of me with long teeth and glowing coal-eyes and howled its long unending tones. And I felt strong again.
Experts say there is a crisis amongst teenage girls, that they feel more alone than ever, that they are persistently and uncontrollably hopeless and sad, that one in every three girls have considered suicide. That one in ten have tried. That queer and trans teenagers are overwhelmed with it, that almost seven out of ten are persistently hopeless and sad, that almost half have seriously considered suicide.
Some experts say it's social media, it's the comparisons and competition and chasm it creates between us and reality, all of us in our own little bubble, all of us running out of air. They say—don't let your daughters on social media until they're 16. Even then, limit it, use parental controls, know what they're doing.
Others say it's the pandemic, the isolation and dissolution of networks, they say we just need schools to have mental health resources. To spot the warning signs. That if they watch us close enough, they'll find the solution.
I wonder when they last talked to girls.
I wonder when they last asked us what we needed, and listened, really listened, even when we weren't ready to talk yet?
At fifteen, I wanted to be feared. I wanted to be feared mostly because I wanted people to look at me with reverence, for their eyes to get wide and sit back in their chairs, to practically hear their minds spinning, trying to reconcile the small girl with dirty blue hair and messy eyeliner with something powerful. A wolf-woman.
The women who command respect with a single word: killers and assassins, the femme fatale, the woman with superhuman strength. You know her, have seen her around on the movie screens and television shows. She wears leather jackets, no one knows anything about her past. She carries around a knife in some secret pocket and any man who dares to doubt her would see what she could do. She was created by a man, though, let's be honest—some man who thought that skin-tight leather and lycra are hot as hell—but when you're fifteen and want to be respected, she's the only image your mind knows how to conjure. She's the answer to it all: how to be brave, how to be strong, how to be loved.
How to be a wolf-woman:
Tell no one your story. Your mystery is what captivates everyone. Keep what you think and feel to yourself, because that's what makes you powerful. Your pain is what makes you strong—hold onto it.
You're better on your own. Other girls are not like you, with their shiny hair and pretty nails—no one respects those other girls, but they'll respect you. You are stronger. You are braver. You are better.
Don't show weakness. Don't mess up. Don't admit you need help; needing help is failing. You cannot fail, because your skill—your power—is the only reason anyone cares about you. Being cared about by someone—anyone, really—is everything.
Do you ever worry you'll forget how to scream? I do.
I dream sometimes that when I open my mouth and try to yell, I forget how my throat moves, how the air gets pushed out of my lungs, how exactly it all works. Other times I dream that my lips fuse together, like some Barbie doll smile melting in the sun, and I try to force a cry for help but find myself choking instead.
The silence starts small.
It starts with the catcalls and wolf-whistles from strange men as you walk alone through the city, wait alone at the bus stop, walk alone back home carrying a stupid bouquet of sunflowers now dripping with their gasoline words. If you were a wolf-woman you would tear out their esophagus, scream at them until they felt true fear, until you felt powerful again. But you are fifteen, and alone, and we all know it's dangerous to stand up for yourself. We all know about the girl, sixteen, stabbed to death on the number nine bus to Stourbridge. We all know we could be next.
So you gather up the words they say and hold them tightly in your hands, blood dripping from the cuts they leave—but wolf-women don't show pain, so you tell no one and move on. You can handle anything, after all.
You watch on the TV screen as yet another girl is shot down in her school—or was it in her home? They all run together—and you feel your throat close up because your bedroom is on the first floor, by the front door, and you can almost hear the machine-gun fire of bullets through the glass as you sleep. And so you fake a stomach ache and lie on the floor of the bathroom at three A.M. with the light on, trying to sleep because at least there you're in the light.
But you smile and say you're fine, because wolf-women aren't afraid of the dark. Wolf-women are born from the darkness and wear it like a crown. You're fine—maybe if you say it enough, it'll be true? If you say it enough, it becomes the only thing you know how to say.
The silence grows until it is not silence but living.
You want to scream into the night but you do not even step outside. The night is not for you. You are not a wolf-woman, you are just a girl. You are not a girl, you are a thing. Your body is not your own, it is used and abused and thrown away. Don't ask me, ask the President, because it is 2016 and my god were you a fool to think that the hopes of young people were enough to stop the fear and hate. You scream, throw your phone against the wall and watch it explode into a million little pieces, crack your knuckles against the doorway and watch the wood splinter and the blood splatter. But only in your mind. You stay quiet. You stay still. You sit at home like a good little girl in your cardboard box, waiting for your wings to grow.
You wait as the world burns.
You wait as the oceans rise, as doomsday comes and nobody cares. The permafrost is thawing, the heatwaves are burning, and the politicians promise nothing, a long time from now. Are you crazy? Are you going insane? You thought being a wolf-woman was your salvatio, but it only makes you silent, makes you scared—wolves hunt by separating their prey from the pack, and here you are, all alone. You have grown so quiet and still and cold and, and—oh god, are you still alive? Check your pulse—call the ambulance—oh god, are you still here?
Please don't turn out the lights—I don't want to be alone.
I just want to talk. I want to talk and talk and talk and talk and pretend and hope and know that someone can hear me, in all of this. In all of this cosmic pain and beauty, that I wouldn't have to be alone.
It is hot, as you sit on your snow-white sheets, staring until your eyeballs ache and burn, half-mad, possibly insane. The hours from midnight to two are not hard—you spend them on that indent in the mattress where you sit while you do your school work during the day, and then later as you watch some fictional spider web spinning a more beautiful lie, willing yourself into the narrative, but you stubbornly stay in the screen-bathed darkness. The hours from two to four are worse, when you tell yourself you'll sleep but you just sit there, waiting for the wolves to come.
Breath shallow, in a box in a room in a concrete world. You are trapped—you feel it coming, in the night, you feel the howling, the hunger song, shrill and sharp, the echoes raising the hair on your arms, and if your body stopped shaking for a moment you might feel the footfalls as they come for you. You try to fly away but you find you have no wings. You have no wings and you try to scream but you find you can't even cry—oh god, where has your voice gone? The wolves circle you, eight hulking bodies hiding in the shadows in the corners of your eyes, in the spaces where the white of the walls meets the bed frame, the closet, the desk—you can almost hear their snarling, the subtle sound of their lips pulling apart, the low growl that starts somewhere deep in their lungs—their lungs shaking their bodies, their bodies that do not know how to give up, not like us, not like our fragile minds that spike us with fear and adrenaline. You pull at the sheets beneath you, picking at the pills in the cotton so that you don't pick at your skin, too late, and behind you you feel them, finding their positions, eyes glowing, alert, ready, ready to claw through your skin, and you, nails already deep into your skin, ready to join them in your own destruction.
Mom, are you awake?
Mom, I'm scared. Can you stay a while with me?
I don't want to be alone right now.
Mom, do you remember when you had that stack of journals from when you were in middle school, and I asked if I could read them and you cringed and said, no way, I was so stupid back then?
Mom, I think we're all stupid when we're young, so caught up in our emotions that everything else fades into the rearview. But mom, your perfection won't save me—show me your stupid, messy self, show me that I'm not alone. I know you're unshakable, invincible, unfazed now, but please, for me, remember when you were fifteen and scared. Tell me how you made it through, stay with me as I try.
Mom, when I went home to your parents house, I saw the pictures of you on the walls. I saw you, just younger than I am, standing so proudly in the woods with your red bandana, smiling so wide, and mom, I wanted to be just like you. I know you taught me how to use a fork and to say please and thank you and to never talk to strangers—is it too much to ask to teach me how to run wild, too? To teach me how you used a pocket knife and the names of the birds that sing in the forests where you hiked all summer? I want to feel the strength that comes from my own two feet taking me miles and miles, to know the peace from the sunlight pouring through the breaks in the trees onto lush green ferns below, to laugh, clear as crystal waterfalls, with you.
I tried to be a wolf-woman, but she didn't make me strong—she is just a girl in a wolf-skin suit who left me at the mercy of the teeth and claws. But even wolves run in packs, and I'm learning how to ask for help.
I'm sorry, mom—I don't want to make you cry because I never asked for help before, because I told you I was fine and fine and fine and you believed me. But mom, I am here because you told me there was light inside me, and I'm trying to find it again. The world feels like it's falling apart, and I feel helpless to change it, but don't you, sometimes, too? Don't you feel the ache between your shoulder blades, the space expanding in your vertebrae where your wings should grow?
Because mom, I can't stop thinking about that one morning that we went out at four thirty to those fields just outside town, sitting in our cheap lawn chairs in the first hints of sunrise, the world painted pink just to hear the dawn chorus of birds. Thousands of beautiful, fragile birds, louder than any clanging gong or symphony. We lost ourselves that morning, lost ourselves in the details of nature—nature that never asked anything from us except to embrace the untamed and broken and magnificent within us and fight to stay that way.
Our hearts are not meant to be a stagnant thing that lives and dies in our chests. They were made to be cared for in a garden, surrounded by the people we love. Too long have I tried to be strong—I think I'd rather be loved by you.
My feet burn on the smooth stone, the rushing water and wind in the trees sounding like ice and the highway roar of cars. I laugh, shaking away the ghost of a city that follows me here. My brain screams no! nononononono and my feet don't care, they take me in anyway—the white static of cold water that leaves all thoughts on the riverbank with my t-shirt and shoes, only the feeling of cold and the laugh half-forgotten in my body as it begins to remember how to breathe again. I wade through the water, so cold, feet narrowly avoiding the sharpest rocks in favor of the smooth ones that slip and slide as I half-run, half-fall, adrenaline pumping more than any roller coaster until I reach the pounding water, the perpetual motion machine of the waterfall, the bubbling gurgling rushing shushing laughing wandering motion of the water that teaches me to let go. And in the warm summer sun, under the cold water, I let the water take it all downstream. I hear your voice break through as I hoist myself back onto the rocks—You've got it, girl—I laugh, strong and graceful as I create a waterfall of my own, water dripping and evaporating in the sunlight on my back, in the sunlight emanating from me, from my family around me, feeling stronger than I ever have. Feeling powerful.
Yeah, I've got it.