girlhood is a prison.

I exist in the space between being adored and being erased.

My male teachers call me “Barbie” like i was born out of a plastic box like my only purpose is to be looked at and found pleasing They smile for too long and compliment me in a way that belittles the girls around me.

I wake up, I do my hair the way I like it: ribbons and stars and bows and things that feel like me, like the parts of myself I'm still allowed to control, the femininity I long to keep, and I walk into a building where I am simultaneously invisible and the most visible person in the room.

The girls don't speak to me but they speak about me. They've decided who I am without ever asking. Boy crazy. Obsessive. Weird. Too quiet but also somehow too much. I’m laughed at, humiliated and excluded. When i’m not in the room the most awful things are said about me. I’m neither liked nor even welcomed.

The girlfriend of a boy I once knew the deepest parts of hates me with a ferocity I've never directed at anyone, and her friends hate me because she does, and the others hate me because hating me is easy, because it bonds them, because I'm a safe thing to sharpen their teeth on. The teachers call me Barbie and smile too long and I'm supposed to be grateful for the soft treatment but it only makes the walls higher.

Outside, men shout things at me from cars, from sidewalks, from the edge of a senior sunrise that was supposed to be just a morning. Their eyes are heavy and I feel them on my skin hours later.

The boy who once whispered I love you at 2am now slams doors in my face and hurts the people I love and acts like I'm the one who ruined something.

The boys I've turned down turn cruel so fast it makes my head spin, like my rejection was an insult they need to punish me for.

I wear pink because I like it, I wear my ribbons and angel wings because It makes me who I am, I put on my rose coloured lipstick because It makes me look pretty, I do my hair differently every week because I hate looking the same for too long, because it's soft, because somewhere along the way I decided I deserved at least one soft thing.

But softness, I'm learning, is not protection. It's an invitation. It's a target. I am so tired of being looked at and never seen. I am so tired of being a symbol, a rumour, a fantasy, a villain literally anything but a girl who just wants to read her books and be left alone. I keep to myself because myself is the only company that hasn't hurt me yet. But even that gets lonely sometimes.