softness

my softness is not a crime.

She is so much smaller than I remember her being.

We sit across from each other, crisscross applesauce, the way she knows. She does not make eye contact with me. It makes her uncomfortable. When I ask why, she says it makes her feel like there are bugs in her skin. I already knew the answer. She rolls the end of her sleeve in between her fingertips, her eyes cast towards the floor. There are bruises on her knees. From trees and the ground, she says matter-of-factly when I ask. I ask if she fell out of the trees. She says that she was flying. That sometimes, if she thinks hard enough, she can grow wings. She asks if that is why there are bruises on my shins. She asks if I can fly, too. If I’ve ever tried.

There is a distance between us that I cannot close. Her heart is beating in her left hand, and she eyes me only when I am not looking directly at her with uncertainty. I wish that I could tell her. That I could warn her about what’s to come. But she continues to sit, to play with her sweater, to let the fresh air brush against her beating heart. She asks where mine is, why I won’t show her, how that doesn’t seem very fair. I don’t have an answer that would satisfy her.

She is quiet for a while, and something in my chest stirs when she smiles suddenly and asks me if I can hear the birds. She tells me matter-of-factly that they must be carrying the fairies home from their workdays.

This is my fractured mirror; a little girl knows everything and a woman that knows nothing at all. She is solid, she is real, and I am disappearing. I watch her as she climbs up to look out the window. She feels so much and everything for her is boundless and wide open. The world hums with magic and the ocean whispers back to her when she tells it secrets.

I am glad she doesn’t recognize me, but it also feels like a gut punch.

I am somehow the little girl peering out the window and the woman hunched on the carpet. Fragmented bodies. In pieces. Someday, we will both be bones, a single minor chord.

---

Before I understood my own body, I was made to cover it up.

you should be wearing a bra and cross your knees when you sit and cover up those shoulders and don’t bat your eyes at anyone that’s cruel and your skirt should go past your knees and that blouse is far too tight on your chest and is that nail polish and wipe off that lipstick you look like you should be on a street corner

I was born a woman. I was born covered in bruises. I was born with fists holding tight to grief that was not my own. I was born armed with knowledge and it is the cruelest gift anyone has ever given me.

---

My body is not my own.

I am not my father’s round face that everyone in my family shares. I am not my eyes, which I think are the only beautiful part about me. I am not my hands, peppered with callouses from childhood tree-climbing, the only remnants of the wildness that roared in my chest before. I am not my mother’s nose or my wrists.

Eyes roam. I can feel them.

My body is pieces. My body is rated and studied and laughed about and longed for and wanted and despised and disgusting. It is not worthy of worship. No, a body, this body, is a circus sideshow. My body is cheap twist-off wine that the first person I loved gets drunk off as they unzip the jeans of a girl they do not know the name of. My body is a film waiting to be reviewed. And despite knowing better, I sit in the back of the dark theater and watch their expressions, thirsty for validation. Only when the credits roll and someone says, “that wasn’t that bad” can I breathe again.

My body is not my own. It never has been.

It never will be.

---

I used to write letters to god.

They gather dust in a box nestled in the very back of my closet, whispers of a time I do not want to remember. It would be a sweet thing, if you looked at it the right way. If you squint at it. A little girl writing letters to god. In another world, perhaps there is something beautiful about it: a letter from one creature aching to be believed to another.

But my letters were not beautiful. My letters have tear stains on them, and at least half the pile beg, plead, for one thing:

Why didn’t god make me thin? Why didn’t god make me beautiful? Why did not eating not solve it? What more could I do? God are you there? Can you hear me?

Sometimes I wonder if I would be willing to love my body if it was not mine.

I look at my body and I do not see a home, because it has never felt like one. It has been a weapon since before I took my first breath, and the only person who bears the scars is me. 

I have spent years of my life occupied with how I might look in a stranger’s snapshot — obsessed with the idea that someday, I might think, “god, I look skinny.” I spent years imagining that moment and feeling the preemptive rush of joy that it would bring, to finally be something worth looking at.

I read once in a class about how three-year-old girls express the want to be thinner, and I ache for them.

I ache for the girl I was at nine years old, who tried to do sit-ups to make the tummy she had go away, who held her shirt away from her body so that no one would see the roundness that formed after she had eaten.

I ache for the sixteen-year-old who had a poster on her wall that said, “goal: 115 pounds!” that everyone politely ignored, averting their eyes when they entered her room.

I ache for the 19-year-old who nearly got swallowed by a grief that she did not understand, that she had nowhere to put down, who saw food as something – and maybe the only thing – that she could control.

I ache for the 21-year-old who punished her body constantly when she ate anything beyond her “budget,” who stepped on the scale twice daily, who may have been shedding weight but was quietly wrapping a cord around her neck. Who believed that if she shed her skin and grew a new one, a better one, a “healthier” one, she would be worth something. Who got compliments on how good she looked now, what was she doing, and ignored the way she never felt warm, always felt hungry, and still NEVER felt beautiful.

There was always more to lose, more to shed. And she did lose. A lot.

And two years later, there are still bits and pieces of her that I am finding tucked in between the pages of my notebooks, hidden under my bed.

I can’t save those girls. I wish I could yell at them, shake them, tell them what I know now. Because someday there will be someone that touches the very places they hate and settles there, unashamed. Who will touch the tummy they hide and say, “I love it.” The softness of their bodies is not a crime. Their bodies are reflections of hundreds of years of bodies that have come before, of bodies that were loved and held, of bodies that stood on the precipices of greatness, of bodies that grew life, of bodies that lived.

I have been so consumed with how much space that I take up in the world that I fear I may have missed the world I pass through entirely.

But still, I resent it. The softness.

How do you do it?

How do you forgive?

The girl I was at seven stares at the ceiling and believes in angels and has a Harry Potter band-aid on her knee and just the sight of her makes me want to cry. All I have ever wanted to do is do right by her, and I do not know if I ever will.

This is a very old story. This very old story only ever ends one way.

I will have to learn. I will have to face the softness that I have forgiven every previous iteration of myself for having. I will have to take it in my hands and hold it close and make it dear to me like a lover and repeat, over and over again:

My softness is not a crime. My softness is not a crime. My softness is not a crime.