Winter Words
It was a lovely dream, wasn't it? And when you wake up, the landscape has changed, for romance is truly hibernation. And it took you this long to wake up to that realization.
When you look up, your friends aren't around.
They imagine that it's easier to be a girl in the business, but you're subjected to the same prejudices, the same ribs, as the boys. Worse yet, they won't protect you like you're 'one of the guys'. Instead, they make you as an object, on sale. Worse yet, a useless object.
You're a dyke. You don't consider that word a slur because you've grown accustomed to its sound. For some reason, the word itself sounds funny to the boys; like a website being bookmarked, someone told you. For your own defense, you've turned their weapon into your joke. So, you're a dyke and you're proud of it, but no one notices because they think you're lipstick. To this day, you're propositioned by hetero boys who think they can "change" you. A good woman couldn't do that, much less an average man. So you shrug, laugh, play along in isolation.
Yet, you wonder where this 'sisterhood' is supposed to be. That lovely, beautiful thing that should sustain you when your family can not. When rationality returns to you, the realization comes; you have ignored them for months, in favor of this lover. Put off returning calls; stayed in nights. Avoided those you numbered your closest, so that you might cocoon with your lover. Now that you need them you realize that you are the subject of a too-far-gone time; you did not feed what lived while other things bloomed; now that love cannot endure. You are as vulnerable as an infant left to starve in the woods. Like a violent earthquake, you are more aware than ever that this virgin love has been bled a deathly white.
So they must not know your love affair is over. They must not be able to tell, because the information could conflate and become one more arrow in their quiver. You are a deer, not a fellow hunter.
Not Diana. Ursula.