The trees in Virginia want to take their land back. Already they seem to encroach upon the roads. Or perhaps the roads encroach upon the forests. The latter seems more accurate. These forests, which have spilled down from those westward mountains older than bones, have been speared through by miles of cement pathways, peppered with brick colonial style homes, and had electric lines anchored down their spines. Nature is everywhere in Virginia. Not artificially. The trees in our yards were not planted there. We built around them. A house at the bottom of the hill I live on has a willow tree in its front yard. It was the kind of tree children knew fairies lived in. If I listened closely, I swore I could hear their wings rustling between the leaves.

When I was 11, I walked past that tree everyday on the way to middle school. My father didn’t walk beside me, his spot now filled by my best friend. We were 11, and in middle school, and wore bras, and we were different somehow, yet wholly the same. In the first month of that school year, a man in a white van drove by the willow tree and tried to haul a girl our age inside.

Suddenly, faeries were not what I saw when I looked at that willow tree.

Towards the end of 8th grade a boy in my history class started following my best friend home. It went on for about two weeks. I asked him to stop. He didn’t. I told him to stop. He didn’t. I yelled at him in front of the bus lane, and a girl I had known since kindergarten had to hold me back from him. The next day, he followed us again. There was no one to hold me back this time. I kicked him in the shin. Hard. 

He left us alone after that.

If I remembered the first time I was catcalled, I'd tell it to you now. If I remembered the first time a man grabbed me in public, I'd write it down here and bare that in words in an attempt to convey the realization that to the world, my skin was of value because I wore it, but it did not belong to me. 

Unfortunately, or perhaps not, I don't remember either of those firsts. After those things have become a near daily occurrence, all the specifics seem to blur together.

The metacarpal of my right middle finger is home to a ring I bought when I was 15. The top is rectangular, the edges sharp enough that when thrown in a punch, skin would be cut, and blood would be drawn. That's part of the reason I bought it.

The ring I sometimes wear on my left index finger is heavy. It is pure sterling silver, shaped in the form of the roaring head of a lion. While I'm not sure it would cut skin, as it has too many rounded edges, it would certainly leave a mark. At minimum it’d result in a bruise, and I’m sure that wearing it would make it easier to break a bone. However, the ring doesn’t match every outfit, so it gets less frequent wear than the other 15 I own.

The jewelry that coats my hands serves two purposes. I wish they weren’t both so tied to the fears shaped like men lingering in the recesses of the mind of every teenage girl, having been passed from mother to daughter, from sister to sister. My rings are protective. They can cut. They can bruise. They can break. My rings look good. They allure. They catch in the hair I drag between my fingers. They promise the kiss of cold metal into warm skin.

I am not so different from the 16 silver pieces on my fingers. I can't afford to be. Because a girl was grabbed underneath a faerie tree. And she very easily could have been me.