When the sun goes down and I am alone late at night and feel the need to hug someone and there is no one there the demons of my life come back to haunt me and I feel the tears that stream down my cheeks and sense the sobs that rack my body but I neither hear them nor know that I am crying.

I think of my mother who I never saw again since that day of the men who came to visit us and I wonder whether she made it, whether my being taken from her affected her so deeply that she lost the will to live, whether the loss of her child was something she could overcome.

We all struggle to survive. Men have this anger burning deep inside them and this hate towards women and it comes out when they take us. The act of love (or should I just say sex) makes them feel vulnerable deep inside and they resent this. As they take, they give, the moment they come they feel weak and they cover this with a violence that’s barely suppressed so that the act of love is an act of hate and it takes so much effort from a woman to soften this, take the rough edges away so that we, who are more fragile, do not get snagged on them and torn. It takes love from a woman (which a man absorbs) it takes giving, even within the boundaries of a bought love.

I know this. I sense it. It is survival. Men use their anger and their hate and the suppressed violence in them to survive. And we…we, women have nothing more than our body, our soul, our sense that our flowering is all too brief and we get used fast and then fade. In a way our desperation is just as bad. We fight hard against time and the cruelty of our fate. We fight hard against the sense that we have so few chances to make the right choice and that much of our fate is decided for us by men.

We are so lost in this men’s world and we strive to find a place in it. It is our nature to flow like water, take the path of least resistance because that often leads to survival. We influence, shape, change and affect things in a soft and subtle way. A whispered word in the right ear late at night. A gentle caress and a desperate giving of self which leads to its own sense of debt and connections made so subtly and used at a level beyond even our own awareness.

At night, alone with my sobs and my loneliness and pain I feel all that and understand and know that the fate I have chosen, that’s been chosen for me, by men, will lead me down a path where I will die alone and unloved, though so many have been in my bed, so many have arched themselves on my body that I have lost a sense of my own self and feel that I am now a thing belonging to others, there to be picked up, used and discarded as necessary.

I guess, in a way I am like a tool, a sword, men use me to satiate their needs much like they use their swords to satisfy their need for violence. I am a sword in my way. I soften the suppressed violence they exercise on me and those who come and ask for me to be used have their own plans and I become a tool within a tool.

Women in a men’s world face such difficult choices and none of them help us become better people.