Chic X Charm

She was not born a woman. AI-Generated.

She had been leaving herself for so long that she had forgotten the exact moment it began. Perhaps it was the morning her mother handed her a dress she had not chosen and called it pretty, and she had nodded because the dress was pretty, and because the nod was easier than the conversation, and because she was seven years old and already understood, without anyone having explained it, that some truths are better kept interior. Or perhaps it was later, in a classroom where she knew the answer and raised her hand and the teacher looked past her to the boy behind her who did not know it, and she lowered her hand slowly, the knowledge still warm inside her fist, and tucked it somewhere quiet inside herself where it would be safe. Or perhaps there was no single moment at all. Perhaps it was the accumulation of mornings, of lowered hands, of nodded heads, of the slow patient work of making herself palatable to a world that had very specific ideas about the dimensions a woman should occupy.