Written and performed with Emerson Quarles at Popcycles, Lincoln High School’s annual talent show, October 2023

Underlined: Emerson
Regular text: Emilia
Bold: Emerson and Emilia together

I’m sorry.
My mother taught me to apologize to the ground beneath my feet before I ever took my first step. 
I speak the language of women. 
It was taught to me by my mother.
And my mother.
And my mother.
And her mother.
And her mother before that.
And, well, before that, we can’t really remember who taught us,
but we needed to do better. 
Speak softer.
Be quieter.
Cross your legs when you sit.
Don’t look at him when you cross the street.
You can do anything you put your mind to!
But not that.

I learned from a young age that when your mother hands you her pain like a gift,
you receive the thing all women must learn to love: 
burden. 

I learned from a young age that his pain and mine were one and the same,
that the moment I didn’t feel safe with a man was the moment I became a woman.
Now, before you get offended,
it’s not you specifically,
don’t worry,
you’re one of the good ones.
We’ve been taught to reassure, but who will reassure us?

Only mothers
and their mothers
and their mothers
can know true reassurance and the feeling of
hopes and dreams
placed upon you in
pebbles, rocks, boulders,
and you can’t help but wonder
what you did to deserve this weight. 

For my eighth birthday, I went to the pool.
I was playing mermaids when my grandmother stilled my bouncing shoulders to tell me she was proud of me.
I was really starting to thin out.
She said my name. 
It sounded like an echo of her own.
My great-grandmother is eighty-five but still ashamed of the bones holding her up. 
Weaved in the generations,
my family is full of little girls crying in their changing rooms,
their clothes are too tight 
No,
they are too big.

The summer before 1st grade.
After running through sprinklers on a cook-an-egg-on-the-pavement kind of day, 
a friend and I sat in front of his TV and began to scroll through channels.
He pulled his shirt off,
a respite from the heat,
but as I began to do the same,
his mother ran over and held my hands to stop them from moving.
I looked up in confusion.
The only differences between him and I were the length of my hair,
the cut of my jaw,
and all the potential hidden underneath my Gap Kids tank top. 
A line in the sand had been drawn,
and I was standing opposite him,
defined, marked, and dirty.

And I can’t help but feel as though I am reading into things,
being too much,
and when my ears start bleeding from these voices,
these yells,
these screams,
I think of my younger self.
She did not need to be strong,
she needed to be a kid.

When I feel as though there can be no sympathy in cacophony, 
no tranquility in humanity’s variability,
I think of my younger self.
The restless nights she spends,
praying to become something she is not.

When it gets to be too much,
and the thoughts come back,
I think of my younger self.
How did she grow up so fast?
Maturity became something she had to know innately.
With womanhood came expectations,
disappointment couldn’t help but follow.

I can’t give a simple answer,
the end-all-be-all to misogyny so deep I would have to get surgery to remove it,
and it is so easy to say “screw it” and drown,
and I think of my younger self.

I continue for her,
her hopes and dreams.

I continue for her,
burden falling through her outstretched hands like rain.

I continue for her,
because she is all I’ve got,
and if I apologize to everyone else for the rest of my life,
I’ll never get to tell her
I’m sorry.