Femme, Fataled

I let her go like the fool that I was
Thought I’d find somebody new
I smell her perfume when my eyes are closed
I see her face on the moon
She doesn’t exist anymore

- Robyn Hitchcock
‘She Doesn’t Exist Anymore’


I have spent the last half hour or so trying to write something, but I didn’t know what it was, until I found myself repeating ‘I was a good woman’ over and over. I think I am needing to mourn, or rather have a good old-fashioned wake, for my former female self. I need to write my her an epitaph and obituary, praise her and thank her and tell her we’ll meet again some day. For I was a good woman. As a grown daughter, as a hetero fiancée, as a bi housegirl, as a dyke partner, as everybody's girlfriend, I was a good woman. And I was proud to be a good woman, to be to be sugar and spice and all things nice, to be the gorgon and the virgin and the crone and the goddess and the slut.

Perhaps she will eventually return in some new incarnation, perhaps my zie will be reborn as she, perhaps time and tides will see me back almost where I began. Perhaps my zie already incorptares my she, and she's never really left.

She’s everywhere now that she’s gone
- Nick Cave
‘From Her To Eternity’

I mean, I can't have spent that many years perfecting my identity as the girl in the song for not even an echo to remain. And it was so many years, and oh so many songs and incarnations: Sheila taking a bow for the Smiths, the Cure's Perfect Girl, The Only Ones' girl from Another Planet, the girl at the bottom of Nick Cave's glass, the Dead Milkmen's Punk Rock Girl spitting out the Crystals Set's stars whilst the Bats were Smoking my Wings, being the girl Devo wanted and the one bathing on Leonard Cohen's roof, the Stranglers Golden Brown with you tied to my mast (yes, I know) and the UK Subs' Tomorrow Girl, not to forget the name I claimed as my own, that of the Birthday Party's Zoo Music Girl:

I call out her name in the night
I call her by her family name
Oh God please let me die beneath her fists