Flowers Are Not Vaginas
On naming abuse and cutting toxic people from my life
My second favorite thing about flowers is that functionally, they’re the plant kingdom’s way of saying WHO TRYNA FUCK?
As a result, they’ve also become OUR way of saying that too. It would be really easy for me to get up here and just be like GEORGIA O’KEEFFE… y’all are smart, you can fill in the rest.
BUT I’m not gonna do that (even though I just did). Because Georgia O’Keeffe herself was like MY FLOWERS AREN’T VAGINAS, OKAY. Stop it.
Because all these art critics…these men… saw her extraordinary and beautiful work and immediately went AH. VAGINAS. Cause she’s woman, she paint vaginas. Because uhh… SYMBOLISM. Nailed it.
O’Keeffe responded to this shit, saying: “[…] when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see — and I don’t.”
“AND I DON’T.” You can feel the contempt dripping from her words like honey — to continue a theme.
The associations others have with you do not have to mean a damn thing. Like when my old college roommate messaged me recently that “Hey, I’m going to be in town, I’m doing a reading, I’d love to see you.” It made me actually think about our relationship.
In college, we were inseparable. We had classes together, we lived together with his fiancé, we worked on the undergrad literary journal. And we hung out together, like all the time.
Since graduation, he’s been living abroad, teaching, and if his social media presence is any indication, he’s even more of a pompous academic killjoy as he ever was then. I remember once, he accused me of playing identity politics for having the temerity… to call myself “Asian.” He once called me “childish” for wanting to go home to see my mom and dad… on Christmas.
I dropped out of college while we were living together. When I moved away to go back to school, word got back to me that he was asking our mutuals if they thought I’d actually stick with it or whether I’d “fuck it up like I always do” and come crawling back. EVEN THEN I still considered us old friends. But when he messaged me, I immediately got nervous about seeing him again and then I realized why.
One night we were on the floor of our mostly furniture-less apartment watching TV and chatting. I made some wiseass remark. He swung his arm around me, hit me in the chest and knocked me onto my back. He’s much larger than I am, and he stayed on top of me. He made some threat that amounted to “Watch your mouth.”
I was stunned. When he let me up, I went to my room. I closed the door and locked it. Then he was outside my room, wanting to talk. I didn’t speak. And after a moment, he got annoyed and said “Fine. Go down to the office tomorrow and take your name off the lease.”
I lived with him for another year after that. We never talked about the incident. And he never apologized.
I let his message sit in my inbox for a week before I told him I was busy that night. Sorry. I could have confronted him, but why give him a chance to defend himself? I fucking didn’t get a chance to defend myself, so no. I don’t give a shit that it took me almost two decades to name what he’d done to me as abuse, but that doesn’t make it any less ABUSE. I don’t want a fucking apology, I’ve got what I want, which is for this motherfucker to not be in my life. At all.
This is a big crowd and I know I can’t be alone here. I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you got the help you need. And I hope you know that you do not owe those motherfuckers a goddamn piece of your life. They might insist that you do, but remember Georgia. Remember that they hung their associations on you as if you think and see what they think and see — and you DON’T.
It’s easy to see flowers as delicate and weak — they bloom, they wilt and they die. But my favorite thing about flowers is that they grow back. As long as root touches soil, you’ve got fields of dazzling color with enough life, enough agency, enough sense of purpose to open to the sun and say I’M BACK, NOW… who tryna fuck?
This piece was originally written for WRITE CLUB Chicago. The prompt was “Flowers” and the time limit was a strict 5 minutes.
