Last spring, I sat in a room while my she-hero prowled between the tables and answered the question we were each complicit in not asking: How do I write a story? Start with the body, she said. Always return to the body.
She said start with the body, and this morning I woke up, but I woke up with that throbbing that’s too central to be heart and too high to be stomach, and I wondered again how much a pancreas weighs. Can I hold it in one hand or two? When I ache in that place, I take one palm and press hard, like on tv shows, how professionals will hold a scared child until that child stops thrashing. If I pin my pancreas’s little fists, will it stop punching so hard? Will it stop being a scared child, stop throwing tantrums. Will it grow up, grow out of this, become an honor roll student, be the sort of pancreas that never runs stop signs, and is careful not to overdrink or speak out of turn? Maybe my pancreas will earn a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe my pancreas will find a cure for cancer. Or maybe my pancreas will explode while I sleep. You never know about these sorts of things.
This week, temperatures in Portland peaked at 107 degrees. It’s stupid hot, the air cloying. The air oppressive. The air holding us hostage. Holding us captive, like an audience. Like we’re an audience, this magician suspends our breath and sweat, look at this trick. Right before our eyes. One sleight of hand keeps all that moisture in the air until we’re nearly drowning rather than breathing. So each day, as the heat wave breaks over us, I leash the dog and we stumble, totter, trip our way down the steep staircase into the basement’s blessed chill.
Self-fulfilling prophecy, I’m living exactly where I joked I would be.
There the dog spreads her bones out on the cool concrete and sighs. There she can breathe easy while I grapple with words. While I try to transform letters into dollar signs. While I empty my head to fill my bank account, and the heart goes on with its heady little woosh woosh woosh unnoticed until it misbehaves, like so many other things. At the end of the day, the first girl to see me inside and out comes down those stairs and curls herself into me. Last year she may have been a back alley apparition, but now she’s weight, and breath, and warmth, and soft; so much her to remind me what it is to feel like me.
Return to the body. Sometimes I get this electricity in my hands and feet that can only escape if I cry. Return to the body. I can’t tell the difference between sick and sad. Return to the body. There are days with too much gravity. Days when everything gets so heavy I have to crawl to get anywhere, so I just don’t bother. Return to the body. Some days I am sick with gravity. Some days I am sad with it. Return to the body. I don’t want to want so much, but thank you for giving it. Return to the body. My body is going to betray me. Return to the body. Every time I drink myself blind, I think I am one step closer to dying. Sometimes that scares me and sometimes it’s a relief. Return to the body.
These long summer days I feel so transient that it is a strange thing to have a body. To be bound by its requirements. To eat, and drink, and sleep, and bathe, and be forced to confront the fact that even when no place is my place, I will still have this body with all of its complicated history and impulses and needs. So I eat triangles of honeydew out of the fridge with my bare hands and lick the cold sweetness from my fingertips, while sweat drips down the backs of my knees and I realize this too is what it means to be alive.
xoxo
-b
