Fixed

Since the beginning of time, men have been the ‘fixers’. They can fix houses, they can fix roads, they can fix cars. Women have been manipulated into thinking we need a man to fix our worlds, that without men, life simply cannot go on. That without a man (without ‘the men’) women universally would fall to the floor, unable to move, to go on, to live, wailing in a painful hopelessness that only the return of men and ego could heal. An image of masculinity strikes my mind, yet it is not muscles nor a strong hand; in fact, there is not a single man present in this image. Men have evaporated from the earth, and women roam the streets, wombs exploding, eternally bleeding, wounds gnashed open - the pinnacle of masculinity is the idea of female incapability to exist without the man.

My life has been a waiting game for a man to come and fix me. In my darkest, most disturbingly crushing moments - as a 13 year old sitting on the bathroom floor and sawing lines in her wrists, or curled up in a hospital bed, weak from the brain that had betrayed the body it controlled - I had always imagined that these moments would be rationalised, romanticised, and resolved by a man. It was as if the more pain I could curate for myself, the more reassurance I would gain from the man who would one day make it his life’s sole purpose to heal me.

I want to be fixed by him. I want to be able to sob into his arms and inhale his male scent, and feel his male touch, and listen to his male voice telling me it’s going to be alright. It would all be worth it then - every scar, every tear, every bad thing that’s happened in my life would all become part of a story to victimise myself to someone who would hold me up and say ‘you are the bravest person in the world’. To gaze at me with soft, admiring eyes as we fucked intensely after the story of how I wanted to kill myself as a teenager. Suddenly, my sad stories would become more than empty moments of turmoil, but what made me desirable to the man. What made me worth loving because my depth was infinite, and the prince could claim his prize for saving the damsel.

Countlessly I would sit on my bed and cry at the abuse I was reliving through my diary. And the pain was manageable by the idea that one day, I would be reading this with him, and he would soak up all my suffering so I didn’t have to live with it anymore. He would hold my hand and whisper sweet nothings into my ear, and he would turn the moments of anguish into something romantic, simply by existing next to me. I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t destroyed, but I desperately desired to be fixed.

What if he fixes you, but not in the way you want to be fixed? What if all you want is blind loyalty, your childhood pet in the form of a man? A prickly feeling of resentment grows inside me, against the fact that he didn’t conform to the idea of the saviour I had designed in my mind. He took his hammer and nail to my life, rebuilt the crumbled surfaces and polished the floors, drew up the drapes, and locked the doors. Realisation shocks through me as no longer do I dream of being fixed, but for someone to cling to amongst the rubble and ashes of my life. For someone to affirm that my pain is the worst, that my pain is unbearable, insufferable, intolerable, his validation alone healing my wounds.

But man’s natural instinct is to fix. He thinks he is being kind, the hero we needed and have sought for so long but when doomsday lands, his actions are only insulting. They cut me to the core, brutal and unforgiving, proving he has fixed what I have only stained. Reducing me to the damsel and the witch all at once. I add to the histories of women gratefully on their knees while men resolve the calamities we have caused. Despite my pride, I sit idly by, knowing that without his will to fix, disarray is all that awaits.