Returning Red

you, me, and very little time

Isabella

I scurry out of my half-packed suite and run up the staircase. It doesn't take me long to run across the corridor on the seventh floor before pushing the slightly closed door of room 710 wide open. 

Austin and Jason are struggling to close a particular black suitcase. Austin is sitting on top of the lid while Jason is trying to zip it. I give Cody a blind eye as I kneel beside Austin and push the laptop in my hand onto his lap. 

He doesn't look at the screen even when I point at it. He leans down and kisses my lips before obeying my request and studying the document on the open screen. 

I had finally finished the write-up for the editorial, just hours before we left the resort. I wanted to complete the loop here. Because Jason needs help zipping up the suitcase and I can't simply stare at my writing, I sit next to Austin and re-read the work that I've already read six times now. 

. . .

*Greeting all the feminists with a champagne glass and all the misogynists with a middle finger*

The CEO of PINK magazine is a woman, and if a group of male chauvinists finds that hard to digest, they can go fuck themselves. (That's about as subtle as this article is going to get)

𝐈𝐬𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚 𝐍𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐦𝐨:

I've lived one hell of a life in my twenty-five years. And by hell, I am not emphasizing something good. By hell, I mean hell—trauma, chaos, near-death experiences, assault, and damage. The reason for my multiple purgatory encounters was mostly staged by men. We're all still debating if this more saddening or fueling.

At fourteen, I was groped in a car in my high school parking lot by my ex-boyfriend who lived under the belief that boys can puppet girls to no ends when they are in a relationship. As wrong as that thought alone is, it is heartbreaking to think about what might have inspired that notion in a fourteen-year-old boy's mind. 

At eighteen, my sister's molester tried to force me and murder me because I messed up his intentions of sexual abuse. He could never digest the fact that a woman he was aggravating, fought back. He was unaccepting of the fact that he didn't take the "NO" as a warning so he was punched into it. He couldn't believe that he was arrested, considering his crime was just forced sex, and nothing else. 

My conviction in the police force grew respect until I was twenty-two, and five officers in the precinct tried to take advantage of me. If the one who is supposed to protect you from monsters becomes it, where on earth are you supposed to turn to for help? 

Assault. It doesn't take a lack of knowledge to do that to someone. It takes a lack of humanity. 

When does this stop? At every few stages in life, we keep getting suffocated and drained out. Why is it so hard for women in the world to live? Why is it that every day we wake up, one mandatory goal is to survive that day without being assaulted? Why does our success bother men so much, when all we do for theirs is applaud? 

Not all men are misogynists, but because most men holding power are, the world can never move ahead. Power in the wrong hands destroys the world. Power in the wrong hands can eradicate a whole clan. 

Women shouldn't curse. Women shouldn't oppose. Women shouldn't revoke. Women shouldn't be running companies, they're supposed to take care of family and the children. Women shouldn't be making more money than their men. Women shouldn't rebel or instigate rebellions.