This is how I learned what’s what. How to be a little girl in the world and be seen and heard. To live a life of glory that dignifies your suffering. It’s all about talking, it’s about how you speak. If you want to be badass and powerful you have to know the right way to speak. I wasn’t born knowing and neither were you. I had to learn and it wasn’t gradual, it was all the sudden. A lightning strike, a thunderclap, a slap on the cheek.

Some people learn younger, but I was seven when it happened. It was on my first-ever visit to JFK Memorial Library at Cal City CC. Dad was still blind then and big into books on tape, so by the arm I led him to the Audio Corner then left to thwack my hands down the rows of videotapes. It was a slow library day, it was graffiti clean-up day, Goth Roger the media librarian sanding off what people pocket-knife on wooden desks. I didn’t know him yet plus he’s fucking weird, teased black hair and shirts with frilly wrists, laces going up the sides of his pants. So I dived around the corner when I saw him, walked down the wall of windows and hid under the farthest desk. Dad would be done soon but I wasn’t ready, I wanted to be alone longer with my thoughts in the library.

I remember the boring brown shoes of a woman walking by on my left. Otherwise it’s an empty moment, a bucket of nothing, but it’s always this moment I enter the memory at: turning to see the woman in her brown Rockports shuffling and then turning again to look straight up at the underside of the desk. 

Some words are carved, some are black Sharpie. They’re terrible and beautiful and when I read them the lighting hits: Jizzcock, Shitmagnet, Shitbag, Bitchtits. Fucktard, Asstard, Dumbass Bitch.

Tamra is a whore. Tamra is a cunt. Tamra is a retard. I heart Tamra’s tits. We are something, we are nothing. Time isn’t real. The self is a trick. I read it ten times but after once a switch flips. Electricity floods my wires, something turns on. For the first time ever there’s something to transmit. Numbers have color, I can taste vowels, it’s like the words reached out and grabbed me and they said sit the fuck down.

I wish I could explain better. There’s an inside and an outside to it, what it was and how it felt, but no way getting you to my side, I don’t know how. But I will tell you this. The alphabetic power of that moment transformed me. It was a baptism, an inauguration, a legit holy gift.

So when next Dad’s calling, when he’s cane-tapping my way, I crawl out from under the desk and I stand up and say: Motherfucker, be quiet, this is a library! Asstard, you’re always such an Asstard Bitch! for the first time I say.

Is such language mean? Does it cause suffering? Maybe, who knows, I don’t fucking care. My tongue had been freed and my words were heartfelt. Heartfelt because that’s where I fucking felt them, burning. 

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Excerpt of Kittentits, Written by Holly Wilson.

Out now and available for purchase HERE.