The unsaid apology

I feel sorry. I really do. I am sorry if you were called out for helping one of your own. I am sorry if they fed on you for doing what you desired. I am sorry if being a feminist was ever a reason of your abuse. I know you’re still finding strength, still out there wanting and waiting to be heard. You want them to know that these weren’t just some ordinary gazes, you want them to feel what it really feels like when you’re touched and how you feel like throwing up when you were flashed at. You see them outraging on your extremism and questioning your heed on matriarchy, but you still want them to know what led you there. You want to clear your name from the feminists-turned-feminazis and all you want is to be heard. But still you’re made to shut up with the cliché oratorical statement of ‘what women want’. You remember as a toddler you were influxed with lessons of gratitude, kindness, fraternity AND respect. You thought you were deserved to be treated as an equal individual whose consent mattered, whose say mattered. Little did you know your crop tee and favourite denim shorts could take it away from you in a jiffy. You envy your brother when he isn’t made to change his sandos every time you go out, you don’t like it when your mom constantly pulls up your shirt when your cleavage shows even when you want it to. You don’t like it when your boyfriend is disgusted by your period and not his materializing best friend. Every time when a part of you vanished from the plain sight, it just became a billboard of a statistical data with a bit of march and protest on the side, still thankful at least you could make it there. Every time you spoke of equity all they heard was equality. When you stood up for your sister, you could hear them screaming on “men facing atrocities” which they never even had thought of before. And when you spoke their language of numbers and graphs, dropped with a bomb of ignorance and irrelevance, I knew you’d had it. You took all what was left in you and somehow carried yourself. You couldn’t talk to your mom she was too busy getting herself tired in the kitchen, standing all day waiting for your father to look beyond his unconsciously serving privileges. You felt doomed. Alone with your thoughts. You could feel your heart throbbing out of your gut. Your fears catharting as that sweat on your hairline, the walls closing upon you, sudden claustrophobia taking over. That time, that millisecond, you finally snapped and unwittingly wanting to slit your predator’s throat. They waited for this time to dawn upon you, for this moment when they finally sucked in your last ounce of blood . Your biggest fear emerged nascent; they stuck up a new name on their big list of hypocrites again, quiet a hypocricy.I am so sorry all you could find was a knife and your pumping vein to find peace. I am so sorry they still want to hear men in feminism.