“On the Other Side of the Body”
I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her own skin.
— Sandra Cisneros
Speak it into existence, and it will be so.
Touch it and it will invert, or bounce, and I’m not sure which is worse.
If you place your closed fist on your hip, does it create a perfect triangle? Or does the side of the shape curve slightly, from the breast to the hip, a valley guarded by plateaus? The hollow space of this shape antagonizes me, a villain the color of sun-bleached ivory and covered in constellations of freckles, Ursa Major on my thigh, Cassiopeia on my cheek.
Space: to take it up or not to take it up?
I drew a rhombus in kindergarten and called it a parallelogram, and my teacher clapped, a sound I would come to crave. A heart, a square, a star; and a circle was a head, and a line was a body, the arms, the legs, stick figures for a reason: to hide the nonexistent organs of which I did not yet know the existence (because it had not yet been spoken).
The inside is a machine. The outside is a dream of a child’s drawing.
Twigs shiver in winter, free of their foliage, like lungs with their branches reaching through the fog, but the heart lies in the roots. And the inside bares the shared truth that the vessel for life is simply that: a vehicle for the brain, which allows for the mind to conjure venom spoken against the bloat of my belly.
Breathe, breathe— that’s it, isn’t it? And the trees are defined by what they are, rather than what they are not. And we insist on illustrating ourselves based on exactly what we don’t have.
A flat stomach. Shoulders to pull off cap sleeves. Thighs that don’t jiggle.
In the Middle Ages, when mirrors were not attached to our hips, pale skin and curves used to be preferred: a bit of pudge to fill out the hips, dips and dimples, that layer of lovely chub beneath the chin that lined the face when a royal grin was expressed by a lady, a duchess, a queen. Slaves took the brunt of skinny insults: tanned and shucking corn among the same fog, but later their form would leave us foaming at the mouth and shelling out money for the same result.
Ernest Fenollosa informed Ezra Pound that some languages are so constructed— English among them— that we really only speak one long sentence in our lifetime.
That sentence is punctuated with ellipses: in these unwritten moments I am sweating, tethered to a notion that my shape is incorrect, the space I take up is unacceptable. How sad! They would say later. She was so beautiful.
When I run, as I did in the chill of this morning, I feel the impact of the concrete against my shins, and my bones are nervous. Am I running towards a thigh gap or running away from a flat bottom, a curved stomach? Perhaps both— maybe it’s only the continuation of that same sentence, the same journey we’ve begun and been on since our first teen magazine, our first received dirty look at the extra side of fries, the first retching.
Hush, the gradation of my love handles is fascinating to me: count the marks. But who cares? They would say later, accepting defeat.
On Instagram, women photoshop glitter onto their stretch marks, thighs lit in shadow, with the caption: you have the waves of the sea writ on your skin, and still you doubt your magic? (We’ll reach the magic later, be patient.) But the worry still pervades: the compliments when the number on the scale is dangerously low (there are those metaphorical kindergarten teacher claps again) tastes better than any oil-soaked potato or can of frosting.
The Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio, gifts to nature, the perfect number of petunia petals, the rings within the trunk of that lung-like tree, the rungs and swirls in a pearly shell, carried in on those waves. The distance between bony shoulder blades, from our eyes to our navels, are perfect, divine even. We are golden, divine machines, exceptional vessels that society has taught us to hate, personal ships that float through life’s ocean learning to loathe their own form, their own purpose. Why?
Why not? They might argue. If we did not compare our physical structures to photographs, to other vessels, to ourselves, we might turn to other disgusting habits.
It— I— used to be worse, I promise. Leaning over the toilet, listing teaspoons of butter per day, browsing the laxative section at the drug store, counting baby carrots. They say you could bite off your pointer finger like said baby carrot, and I would wonder how many calories that would be.
The shape of love is not a circle, a stick, a columnar thigh with sparkles. I think it is also not the lack of space between thighs, a hollow, peppered in shade, or the curvature of a full stomach. I think it is the other side of the body.
Look in the mirror. Shed your clothing first, and then touch the mirror. Feel your reflection (backwards and microscopic). It is known by few that atoms themselves never touch each other. So, we are always floating above— levitating, that’s a space genius— what we are sitting or standing on, or pushing against, at a minuscule difference. This is why we touch each other so hard, stand breathing so close that moisture forms between skin cells. It is also why we leap, run, soar— to increase that distance, to be free of the burden of knowledge that we are never actually anywhere.
And yet we take up space. Every single being— tree or twilight drinker— does.
In touching the mirror, in embracing its cold glass, a modern Vitruvian woman, fog it up as you shower yourself in compliments, praises that have little to do with the shape of the way you take up space.
The shape of the way you take up space. Circles and sticks or a relevant caption? Glitter or a pervasive obsession for running? Inhalation or codswallop?
The other side of the body is… the soul? The mind? The love? The magic? What is on the other side of the mirror. Is it a wall? Or the entrance to nothing that means everything, because your reflection is no longer seen, spoken, important? See, do not be seen. Embrace, do not let others quiver. Breathe, do not be told how to exhale. Be without regard. Be regardless, your reflection only glimpsed in the eyes of others; that is to say, invisible unless fogged.
Be invisible to yourself, take up space to others. (There’s your answer.)
The threshold is in front, and the space of the other side of the body is the shape of something intangible, but I think it looks like me, tastes like vanilla, smells like a well-used kitchen, sometimes sweat, sounds like someone who loves words and whose bones are nervous with passion, and feels like a vessel carrying the golden ratio of veins, ventricles, muscles, atriums, all things that beat, bleed, and believe.
