Water-shedders.

Women, someone once said, are water-shedders. Women’s bodies collect and dispense fluids. From tears over love lost to flashes from absenting hormones, we drip onto the ground, wet our surfaces, slip and slide through our race to grab onto each other on a layer of fluid more alike than not. We fail more often than not. We sweat more than we drool, vomit more than we feed, let loose a greater volume of tears than birthwater, more waste urine from bar drinks than menstrual blood from refused pregnancies–we drip and piss and sweat it out from one year to the next in hopes that we are really growing more beautiful, less fat, more brilliant, less mean, more talented and famous, less left behind. Until the year when we see that we have dripped away our energy and we can only weep for the past and ask, is this all there ever was?

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From Sister Gin by June Arnold (Women’s Press, 1979) p. 54.

Filed under: words from women by Amy's Brain Today