Early on, I remember the fleshy dough of baking bread puffing over a loaf pan. I remember a fading yellow sun against peeling linoleum floors and a warm dish towel shrouding the loaf. I remember taking a fistful of the fluff and holding it tight in my grip, pale dough oozing between my fingers. A disgusted and curious delight poured over me; how easy it was, to shrink what once was a mound of airy dough into a tough ball that fit in my palm. How easy it was, to remold its entire shape.
I am older, and my grip is stronger now. Yet I grab the section of my stomach right beneath my belly button, a field of tanned skin sprouting wiry long hairs, and do the same thing. My body squeezes desperately out of its container.
When the lights are off and I can hold my stomach in the dark, I wonder why. I wonder why I cannot marry myself. Why I cannot marry my wandering atoms inside with the doughy limbs that take up space. Why I cannot marry my blood and my body.
Before this chasm formed, I used to stare into the sun. The light pulled me in and I stared and stared. I saw too much and I would lose my body, and eventually I became both the palpable edges of the fire and the nothingness of light.
Then I consumed. I wanted to be the marbled statue in the park and the vacuuming black hole. I began to eat and eat and shovel the exhausted air into my puffed cheeks. I ate rusty razors, old conditioner seeping out the bottle and perfumed magazines. I ate the warm crinkle in her eyes from the flowers he gives to her in the park. I ingested the slim woman with the wood floor who rises in the morning light like bone birds and wakes celestially like the sun, a woman who breathes deeply and eats pale globs of yogurt and grapefruit in a painted ceramic bowl. I devoured the pale woman who wanders into a dusty yellow bookstore and purchases brown edged books with yogurt in her marble stomach and her body lighter than the book she holds. I digested the woman who braids herself through crowds like it is her special talent, her body oozing between people and her purse held close to her flowing lean torso.
The bird bone woman has never had to say excuse me. She has never laid in the dark and grabbed her own stomach and wondered why. She eats yogurt in a pretty bowl and she has never had to smash her body and her mind together as if God gave her these two things in the form of two Legos with missing pegs. She hears me saying I want to lose more weight again and tells me not to worry about superficial things like that, because she breathes deeply and eats her yogurt. The woman who looks like the celestial sun and bird bones in the morning eats yogurt out of a pretty bowl and grows, in delicate intervals, by sunlight. She looks like yogurt: pale, milky, bouncy. I have digested this woman my entire life, and yet I want another bite.
When the chasm was forming between me and myself, I would retreat to my dreamland to meld myself together. In dreamland, songs sang in my ears like flickering screens in movies and flashed into me like sips of a good story. I could fantasize squeezing my body into a small dark car on a buzzing night. My body would feel like the floury strands of gluten stretching and folding, kneaded and fresh and expanding. I would be sitting next to vibrating bodies, bodies who were like me, bodies soaking in the whistle feel of air passing by your ears. I would open my eyes, my eyes like wide shining quarters, letting the neon lights dance on the swallowing pools of my irises. I would be rising in my slow bread way.
In my dreamland, there are no big clouds, or the smell of lemon drops. In my dreamland, the man with the flowers and the yogurt woman evaporate and give me air. In my dreamland I can hold my wandering atoms in my trembling hands. In my dreamland I feel my blood. I know the greeting between my blood and my body, for what feels like the first time. I know a marriage strong like the white knuckle grasp of a girl climbing in the jungle gym. I know a marriage that carries my shaking words in my mother's eyes. In her mother's eyes, and the deep eyes who held her. In brown grandma's eyes. I know a marriage free like the girl who stared into the sun.
In my dreamland I know a marriage. In my dark room I hold my stomach and I know I have eaten too much bread.
tangentwithtanner
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
areudirty
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
