Ella O

If Jesus actually did have a wife, and history unfolded exactly the way it has, then she would be the most silenced woman in history and the woman most in need of a voice. I’ve tried to give her one.

“Copies of your writings are gradually being dispersed,” she said. “They shed a beautiful light, but they will unsettle people and threaten their certainties. There’ll come a time—mark down my words, I foresee it—when men will try to destroy what you’ve written.”

One morning I found I could not force myself from my pallet, nor swallow my fruit and cheese. Yaltha felt my brow for fever, and finding nothing, bent to my ear and whispered, “Enough, child. You’ve grieved enough. I understand he has abandoned you, but must you abandon yourself?”

What an unbelievable scam it is to get everything you’ve been told to want.

Like I always say in my first lecture to every new class, there is no gifted. Only the gift of being fully oneself, and expressing oneself to the utmost.”

Even though my work was previously meant to act as a bridge between art and the internet, I’d hated the intrusiveness of it. Especially social media. My screen, that shiny black pool I longed to escape into again and again, even though it filled my mind with the black bile of jealousy and bitterness. The shrinkage. The side-by-side comparison.

Is there anyone who knows a young woman’s body better than her closest friends? By way of love or comparison or some combination of the two?

It never occurred to me to be competitive or even jealous of men. For a long time, I’d worried that it was internalized misogyny before I realized that the only artists I respected enough to envy were women.