Breakable

I’ll repeat this as many times as I think you’ll need it.

Boys are breakable. Even though they are brought up into believing that any relationship is only proprietary, that any relationship works only with dominance and control, they are as breakable as any of us. Boys going home after a dance night, alone. Alone, because their date found someone who could sweep them off of their feet better than they could. But they dare not show a tear, because father said that it would make them mere and meek. Less masculine.

Boys whose cheeks and chests are met with buckles, even before they are old enough to wear one. Boys who learn to bandage their calloused and battered bodies with a thick layer of nasty sarcasm. Boys who have been beaten by the obsolete belief that masculinity scores higher than humanity. Boys who want to talk about their favourite books and the constellations adorning the sky, but end up talking about porn.

Men are breakable. They held their mothers through difficult nights and cradled younger siblings in the school hallways when they were being bullied. Men who are labelled ‘gay’ for holding back a drunk girl’s hair as she throws up in a trash bin. Men who let her sleep in the same bed as them and do not take advantage of them. Men who make her coffee to help her battle her hangover and drop her home safely after.

Men who are constantly tell themselves, and others of their kind, that they are not broken. That they are wild horses. Barbaric. Men who constantly tell themselves that, but desperately want to watch another sappy romantic movie without being called a ‘faggot’.

They love the night sky and trace constellations on table tops. They fall in love with the beauty of moonlight, that of every planet and every galaxy. All while knowing that they shouldn’t speak of them openly.

They deserve every bit of the bawling they need as much as the brawling they’ve got.

We are stealing exactly half of the world with the world that they desire, and leading them to one that we think they should desire. I think we have a problem, here.

~Ritika