reading room
None of the Above
If you expect a man— (whatever that means) —you will be devastatingly. disappointment.
What is a man? a jawline. a silence. a violence. [none of the above].
And what is a woman? softness, sweetness, fertility, fashion, the choreography of deference. (I decline the role the costume itches.)
So what's the value of words that shift like sand? man. woman. push them, and they collapse. no weight. no measure. just stage directions, colours tipped from a child's crayon box, stubby sticks of blue and pink, breaking in my hand.
Maybe you want absolutism— a checklist of roles and traits to separate the man from the women.
A man provides. A man protects. A man speaks last, loudest, least about his feelings.
A woman tends. A woman softens. A woman shapes herself to fit the room she's given.
But here I am: not provider, not protector, not silent, not stone. Not tending, not softening, not rehearsing deference.
The categories bleed, and I am standing in the spill, ink running, pigments merging into colours you don't have names for.
So I write my own line: gender—non—participating. not between. not beyond. not other. simply uninterested. —the game bores me.
If you expect a man, or a woman, or even a neat refusal, you will be disappointed.
I build myself elsewhere: outside your ledger, outside your costumes. call me absence. call me silence. call me disappointed expectation.
But know this: I have built my worth from stones outside your system, and I will not trade them for the flimsy currency of gender, nor for crayons of pink and blue when I have a whole spectrum— violets, greys, greens, shades unnamed and spilling— across my hands.
— Lilith