January 2023 | Body

look at that body

torso biscotti

pull me two shawty

double the hottie

          It starts with the skin thing. I usually describe it as my skin "crawling," but that sounds more like a goosebumps-y sensation. Maybe it's more like not having skin at all. As if the muscles and tissues were exposed to the air, and you can feel prickles of dust settling between the sinews. Can feel your clothes rubbing and sticking to everything.

          My first impulse is to get up and pace, moving my feet to distract from the sensation. Like shaking my head to expel an unpleasant memory. But the house begins to feel even colder than usual, and I'm driven back under the blankets soon enough. Then the headache starts. I've never had a migraine but I imagine it to be like, half a migraine. It doesn't respond to ibuprofen.

          Fever is 102.9. My palms are sweaty, despite the body chills I'm feeling. My heart races despite the fact I'm lying completely still. Just inexplicably wired. I dig my earbuds from the nightstand. I listen to the Wii sports soundtrack; that usually slows things down. No one could be stressed while listening to golf, "course select." But my heart keeps racing, right on through baseball, bowling, and tennis.

          Now that I know it's serious, I get out of bed, but I keep all the blankets wrapped around me. I abandon all pretensions of sleep and completely change tack.

          I totter down the stairs to the basement and rummage through the tv stand for the wii. My head throbs even worse leaned over like this, and my skin still feels raw even under all the blankets. I persist, deeper into the tangled wires of discarded technology; past Jerry Maguire on DVD, past Jerry Maguire on VHS. My forehead beads with sweat. There.

          I yank the whole kit and caboodle out from the stand, and wipe the dust on the outermost layer of my cocoon. For a brief moment I fear my tv can no longer accommodate the old a/v cables, but the yellow red and white receptacles are all there. The utopian wii lobby appears in such a brilliant flash of white that I instinctively throw up my arms against the blinding rays. Thankfully the wrist strap was muscle memory.

          Here I stand at the altar of fitness. I slowly raise my eyes to meet a robust, healthy mii. It deigns to smile.

          The first three frames are rough: a split, a spare, and then two gutter balls. My feeble wrist flicks valiantly but can't seem to coordinate with my trigger finger for the release. It probably doesn't help that I'm bundled up like a mummified bedsheet ghost. I shed the garb for a moment and get my first strike.

          After four rounds of bowling, two tennis matches, and nine holes of golf, I check for any improvement in my symptoms. Skin crawls, head throbs, and now I'm shivering uncontrollably in the frigid basement air. Defeated, I take up my burden of blankets and crawl back up the stairs.

          Now that I know it's corona nineteen, it's back to bed and back to the wii sports soundtrack. But this time the unofficial version by Gabriel Gundacker. That's right: wii curling, wii jogging, wii croquet; all the missing sports that left the original release so unmistakably hollow.

          When wii jogging kicks in like a groovy yamaha p-45, my fever jumps to 104 and I shake harder. That's right I tell my body, get mad. And before long wii chess in the park has the fever dropping to a cool 101, and the headache down to a simmer. That I can work with. Thanks Gabriel Gundacker, for helping a body out.

Nature or Nurture? 

What a stupid debate. 

Of course it’s both–it’s always both–they are inextricably linked, impossible to even study the effects of one isolated from the other because as soon as you begin to affect one, the other is changed as well and neither exists in a vacuum. 

I tend to think of nurture as a more dominant force, because it’s the framework I’ve constructed for my experience as a human. I’m prone to this idealization that my experiences mostly make up who and what I am and my body is just the vehicle of that experience. But it’s so much more complex than that. 

I heard about a study in which people who had chronic anxiety found it to be reduced by taking probiotics–in a way showing that not only does your anxiety affect the state of your gut, but what your gut is like affects the state of your mind. 

Who we think of ourselves to be is usually some vague idea of personality acting of its own accord. But really who we are is neural pathways in our brain interpreting signals from the outside world given by different parts of our body; and the interpretation that groups and categorizes and re-categorizes these signals into information and eventually translates into our personal motivation for doing what we do is not some clean thing; it’s tainted by all of these bodily things like our hormones and mirror neurons and how much sleep we get and our blood pressure and adrenaline and our dna and epigenetics and what we eat or drink and what our mother ate or drank when she was pregnant with us and how deeply we breathe and what we remember in any given moment. And don’t even get me started on how complicated memory processing is. 

Honestly, no one understands why you do what you do. You definitely don’t. There’s too much happening all at once! What we watch or scroll through or read or hear other people say or learn in class or pick up from our family members definitely affects our desires and our actions, but it’s all manifested in a physical way–we can’t escape that. 

We can’t know anything at all that our bodies have not told us. But somehow I think about mine so little. I pay attention to it when it comes to aesthetic, until of course it stops functioning in the way I want it to–then I give it enough attention to lament and loathe it. But it deserves the recognition always. I am nature and nurture. I am natural and nurturing. 

Our thought habits are shaped by our physical habits and vice-versa. So let the recognition wash over you when you lean in to listen or reach out to feel or kneel down to pray. We are flesh. We are incarnate. We are our bodies. Our bodies are us.

Went to claim my "free" prize at that gym, and was instead aggressively sold a gym membership. Well, not sold. I didn't buy. But I almost gave in. I wrote this down just to remember that I need to not be so easily pressured into doing stuff I don't want to do. I didn't need to say "I'll think about it." I should have said no very plainly. I hated that, not just because I was lied to about free stuff, but because that guy called out the potential in my gullibility.

Jane went back home after a long grueling day waiting for news at the station, sat on the edge of her bed, and cried. 

Could he really be gone? 

Seems she had just gotten used to the space he took up next to her, the warmth of his body joining to the warmth of hers beneath their thick quilt, the passage of breath in and out on her neck as he slept. And now as she turned off the light and crawled into bed fully clothed, she felt as if there was a weight pulling the mattress where he used to sleep–as if his body was still where it should be. She closed her eyes and let the exhaustion of grief overtake her. “Jane?” 

             She sat up straight with a sharp intake of breath at the whisper beside her. “Walter? Oh my god, Walter? Where have you been? How did you get in here? You’re alive?” She immediately began to feel for his form, grabbing his face and kissing it fervently, almost frantically. 

“Jane, it’s so hard to explain,” he began between kisses, “I don’t know what’s become of me… I–” 

“But they found your hat in the–they were so sure you’d drowned–they told me–” She paused, “Why can’t I see you?” 

It wasn’t just the dark. Her eyes had adjusted enough to see everything around him, and though she could feel and smell and hear and taste him, he was simply not visible. “Why can’t I SEE you?” She repeated. “Walter, am I dreaming? …Are you a ghost?” “To be honest, Jane, I’m not certain. One moment I’m walking along the edge of the old quarry, the next I’m washed up, scaring everybody in town… but I don’t feel like a ghost. I get cold and tired and hungry and I can’t move through objects… I'm here, I am sure of it. You just can’t see me." 

Jane inhaled a deep breath. She smelled him so certainly, the scent she had spent the last two long nights grasping fading hints of that she was sure would eventually disappear forever. But he hadn’t disappeared! But he had disappeared… When she exhaled, she wept, and held on to him tightly. Now was the time to experience his presence. Trying to understand was for later. 

Later, when she would suggest seeing a doctor though he would refuse. Later, when they decided to call his scientifically oriented friend Ricky, and have him be the one person they tell. Later, when everything normalized and continued and regulated so much so that understanding wasn’t something she felt like she needed after all. 

And much later, Jane's mother paid a visit. 

"You haven't been quite right since Walter’s death.” 

“Disappearance.” 

“Fine then, disappearance.” 

"And just what is it that you feel is different?" 

"Well that's just it, Janey, you haven't been much different at all, have you? You haven't mourned properly, it’s like you haven’t accepted it or maybe don’t care, and I'm sorry to bring it up but I just have to– people are talking, Jane!"

"Well, I told you, I tried to explain, I don’t have to ‘mourn’ because I still feel him with me. To be with a person is more than just seeing them–and just what is it that people are saying anyway?” 

"Well, people are noticing Janey that you have been spending an awful amount of time with that man–that Ricky man–that sometimes he even comes to your house when no one else is home, and I've been worried–I hope I'm wrong, but you seem to be different… I hate to ask it, but Jane–" 

Jane looked down at her abdomen. She held it with both of her arms. She knew what her mother was getting at because everything was different now and would never be the same again. 

“I’m fine,” she interrupted, “You don’t need to worry, I’m fine.” 

But as Jane was soon to find out, a mother’s natural state was worry, so there wasn’t much to be done about that. 

But Jane wasn’t worried, not yet. She sat contentedly on her sofa, hand in hand with the man she loved. She contemplated her two invisible family members–Walter with his “inverted blindness” as Ricky had been calling it, and this new growing child. Each taking up space, each affecting that space, but nowhere in sight. 

There are many ways to know someone and to be known, she thought. And she squeezed the hand next to hers thinking she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Swiper finna b swipin

Foxes want a piece of the icin

One percent is gonna be cryin

Swipa clique is equalizin

They say they adventurin

But really they just oppressin

Can you say, capital mistake?

Delicioso! Go eat cake

Dora and the bourgeoise

And their pockets full of police

Ain’t got shit on Swipa steeze

Can’t contain the uprising