Being a Body - redux
I dreamed recently I was kissing a friend I have no business kissing, and woke up with a guilty excitement, like the morning after blurting secrets over beers. - - - I’m a part of an art project about bodies, about being bodies. Each month there is a new body part to explore. This month is head. It’s nearly over, I think, and I’ve only submitted a measly three lines about my belly. I wanted to do it because the year before my body was strange to me: sick, and skinny, and never doing what it was told. But this year, the last six or seven months, it’s like i don’t even have a body. Each month nothing revealed itself to me but disconnection. I can’t relate to what is below my ears. I don’t know how. What I see and feel spooks me, suggests the presence of new and unknown little ghosts. The ghosts of desire, of hunger, of shapes I used to make. For the first time in my life, I have real and serious pain in my joints, I’ve gained weight that I don’t know how to lose, and the sun no longer browns me like a berry, but burns. I have not been touched by anyone in any meaningful way since January. I barely want to touch myself. My body is foreign, it speaks to me in languages I don’t understand anymore. - - - It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed about this friend. In fact, he’s become the man of my dreams; once or twice a week, for the past few months, he shows up in my subconcious mind. Once, we were in a forest and nothing happened. We were just in a forest. Quiet. Dark. Another time, there was a war and we were huddled together in my grandmother’s attic while bombs dropped outside. Dreams are only interesting to those who had them, I know, but here’s one more: I was fixing his air con unit, but it was set up like an elaborate puzzle. I didn’t solve it in the dream, but I texted him the next morning to ask, hey, how are you? How’s your air con? It was fine. Each dream draws him closer to me, imagined or not. We share a connection in my head, the intimacy we have in my sleeping life is played out when awake: I see him at birthday dinners or bump into him on our bikes, and I’m friendlier, more touchy, more smiley. I know you, my smile says. We’ve been through something, my hands say. - - - A recent month’s body part was pelvis. Mine is fucked, to put it nicely, and causes chronic pain in my left side and a limp in my left leg. It shoves down into my sacrum, where there is a little ghost: an extra vertebrae. A thin, sloped little tai. I walk around on two legs, but one is a bum leg. There is so much scar tissue around my hip that my movement is considerably restricted. Lately, more than ever. I have trouble sitting for longer than twenty minutes without pain. Bending down to tie my shoes causes electric shocks to shoot up and down the length of my spine. Sitting on the toilet is painful. I am thirty years old. This has been happening since I was sixteen. It comes and goes, and is always different in little ways. Scars and tears and little ghosts in the muscles. I can withstand a certain amount of pain. I have a fairly high threshold, in fact. That’s the thing with chronic pain - you just get used to being hurt. - - - As a yoga teacher, I help other people be in their bodies. I help them get to know themselves below their ears, and eventually, the self that is between their ears. This last year I have felt like a fraud. My body is a mess. I am a mess. Many nights this last year I came home from class and got into bed with a beer. I am in pain and I have pain, and I am a body, and my body hurts. I lie to them each time I smile from upward facing dog or demonstrate a handstand, just like I am lying now. I am lying, because this is not just about my body, but also a boy. It’s about a boy, and about getting my heart broken so badly it split me into pieces. A heart wreck. A kind of violence occurred, and the trauma was a part of every thing for so long - I felt it in my heart, in my lungs, in my legs. Every itch, every exhale, every twitch in my eyelid. I was a wound. Open and bleeding. I got sick, I got skinny, my body stopped doing what it was told. Do not desire, I instructed it. I desired. Do not be weak. I was weak. I swallowed pain like a pill and my lungs became infected, not once but twice. I used an inhaler, I had an IV in my arm for a week. It’s not sustainable, though; to be a wound. At a certain point the muscles become stronger in the way they are repetitively used, they learn to hold new shapes. - - - I saw the man of my dreams recently, over late night drinks with other friends. No kissing, no touching. That’s all in my head. The days are hotter than ever lately, but evenings arrive earlier, and cycling home tonight I noticed leaves scattered in the street, and all three things remind me nothing lasts. The heat, the light, the leaves. Everything will change. The shift in temperature brings a little awareness back to my body. The way my eyebrows catch my sweat. The softness in my cheeks. I feel my skin react to the cool air of the fan. Sitting on the floor next to him, legs pushed to the side. The body language changes, doesn’t it? With time. The shape of heart break relaxing, the relief of chronic pain. Muscles have many ghosts, and long memories, the body doesn’t keep secrets for long.