Looking Over My Shoulder

I’ve been looking over my shoulder everywhere I go, ever since I was old enough to know how. When I was a young girl, my mother told me that when she was no older than I was, the teenage boy who lived next door to her saw her playing outside. He took her to his backyard and violated her. A few years later, I learned that my aunt was raped at a party in high school, that my great-grandfather molested his own daughters. It terrified her that this horrible evil consuming my family might claim my little sisters and I as well. It terrified me that the same thing might happen to me or any of the women and girls I knew. My mother taught me to never go somewhere alone with a man whether he was an uncle or a stranger and to always, always, look over our shoulders, to be aware of our surroundings. Anything could happen any moment. So I’ve spent my whole life looking over my shoulder for myself, for all my fellow sisters, and each year I get more angry, more exhausted, more frustrated that this is my constant reality. That I can’t go anywhere without the femininity I wear on my skin, the womanhood I carry in my bones, making me a moving target. Because if I stop looking over my shoulder for even just a second, will I be next? Because if a little girl can’t dance innocent and free in her garden, if a young woman can’t be young and have fun and laugh with her friends and peers on a Friday night, or find a safe haven in her own home, then is she really even getting to live? Or is she merely surviving? I’m so tired of surviving this hunting ground of a society, in this battlefield of a world where I have to be a warrior just so I can be a girl. I will be looking over my shoulder my entire life.