Pavel

You’ve named me, months before my birth. I was first a thought, before your thought metamorphosed into a seed, sprouting. You named me Pavel, a boy’s name that you practiced calling, a name your lips would form with pride and anticipation. Pavel. 

I came to you as a disappointment at first. You prayed so long for a son and yet your stubborn god gifted you a daughter. It took you years to learn my name, to untangle Pavel from your mouth and remember Para. 

Perhaps with time you learnt how to love me, within your heart the secret of your desires concealed, pressed, like a flower pressed between the pages of a heavy book. I remember how you taught me to pick flowers, fresh and blooming, and place them within books, to press. Lavender, chamomile, roses. It was your way of accepting that I am a girl. Pick, press. 

I grew up wishing I was a boy, I thought it would be so much easier to feel less, to be stronger, to have hair that takes no time to braid or comb, to have a body that demands less of me. I thought you’d love me more that way. For you, I learnt how to fight, I learnt how to swear and march the streets of my home town rebelling against governments, teachers, schools, establishments. A little warrior. I cut my hair short, painted it red. Maybe then you could see me. Maybe that way you would pay attention. 

For you I made myself smaller, acceptable, more loveable. Years later I found out that Pavel means small. Yearning to belong, my sole purpose became to please you. 

It was the day I found a dried flower between the pages of one of your rusty ancient bibles that I remembered who I was before you named me. I ran my fingers over it – lifeless, stifled, dry. I felt sadness, or maybe it was anger. A sense of recognition that you were frightened by the life I would bring; that I would bring light to the darkened places of our life. You prayed for small, quiet and accommodating. You knew I would be so much more than that.

I practiced how to hold my tongue for too long, how to be small and pleasing.

I no longer wish I was anything else than what I am. I leave behind the name you chose for me and with it I shake off your fingerprints off my skin, like a snake shedding. I am no longer your dream. I grow my hair long, dance bare-skinned with the moon. My belly holds the remnants of the country that I left behind, the home that chased me like a stranger. This body is holy, water, thunder storm or ocean, hips that hold ancestral pain. I release the memory of you, your dreams are no longer mine, I am not a consequence of your desires. I am a wild woman. I release you like a tree dropping its leaves into compost one by one, nourishing earth. I am holy. 

I am a Woman.