I’d been full once, a long time ago. Ideas and desires, opinions and ambitions, mixed vigorously together to form their own kind of cocktail, the flavour changing daily as life did and does. I was spilling with aliveness; unashamed in joy, unselfconscious in sadness, unbounded in rage.

But I grew up as a girl, you see, a girl who was not yet a woman and then all of a sudden, a woman who was just then a girl. The heat of expectation sucked the freedom from me, greedily drinking me dry until all that remained was the last few droplets of who I’d once been.

I weaponised the stolen space against myself. Convinced that the drought was all my fault, never once stopping to consider who controls the rain. I fought against my empty vessel; gouging out parts of me and pummelling myself with violent words. Scars formed meandering pathways on my skin (and underneath it too) but they didn’t help me find what I was looking for.

Along the way, I met people I thought could help fill me back up. Fit to burst with the importance of themselves, I thought perhaps they would be inclined to share. I let them place their hands on my severed body, tender at first. But they dug their nails in hard, ripped open wounds only just beginning to sew themselves together. Blood crimson and seeping, raw flesh violated and exposed. Still, I waited for the dam to burst. The rain to fall. To be watered back to life.

Instead, I found solace in other half empty beings, shrivelled small by the gluttony of their own experiences. Women, mainly, taught to shrink their bodies, their anger, themselves. Convinced to believe we were thirsty, drinking our own selves into nothing. 

But. We began to talk. Each word a gentle and gradual awakening to the systems surrounding us, those that are designed to lessen us bit by bit, drop by drop. We helped each other see that the wrathful marks we were etching into ourselves didn’t belong there. That our soft warmth was a comfort and not a failing. We wrapped each other up with the flesh we’d thought rotten, the difference between putrid and purity dependent only on who was looking. 

Soon, we discovered what it felt like to laugh. A liberating chorus, that hurt our bellies and made tears fall from our eyes. One at a time at first, but enough to remember. And then there were reams, twin rivers flowing from head to toe. The water we were so desperate for arrived in a flood and it turned out the sea wasn’t where we thought it was.