Body (n.): Old English: “trunk, chest; of unknown origin, replaced by leib, originally meaning “life”.
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Life connects so closely to the body. How it directs, chest full of everything it holds onto.
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Fooling the body doesn’t work. Even when equipped with this knowledge, I still to this day constantly try. But stress knows how to manifest itself in the most obvious ways.
How does one face the facts they can’t ever seem to accept?
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Face (n.): from Latin facies “appearance, form, figure,” and “visage, countenance”, which probably is literally “form imposed on something”.
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Form imposed on something.
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In the sixth grade, a small lump started to grow on my top of my eye until it developed into a cyst that covered the whole length of my right lid. It didn’t hurt, but looked like a massive mosquito bite on top of my eyelid, which left me with a permanently half-closed facial expression, an imposition.
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I needed to become a new person.
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My mother said I could be anything / I wanted—/ but I chose to live –Ocean Vuong, Thanksgiving 2006
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The stab of anesthesia, a deepened prick veining within my roof of the skin. When the surgeons had to flip my septum inside out to remove the puss, my mother later confessed to me that she almost fainted.
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Then, faint-faced blemishes imposed my skin. Always the scars.
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Looking at myself at a different angle, in artificial light, in the privacy of my own room:
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I walk to it: a razor / sharpened with silence-Ocean Vuong, Thanksgiving 2006”.
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I live in my head too often.
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Why am I always thinking about the power of words, the letter’s edges and how they pierce?
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A lipstick-kissed letter can look like a scar, the carmine color as urgent as that of a half-eaten strawberry squished onto the upper right hand corner, the replacement of a stamp (not that I ever really wear lipstick anyway, but it’s the idea of love that counts).
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A letter can act as a chest of clinging, a hold of emotion:
Leviticus 19:28: [You are not to] tattoo yourselves or cut gashes to mourn for the dead.
I am the LORD. ]
Yes, I think to myself, because god is now the one convincing me to do it even more––tattoo myself. I always wanted to be part of the punk scene when I was in middle school, but I felt like a fraud without inked skin, the opposite of artistic and resistant and freeing. I remember when my best friend (one of my only friends from my miserable private Jewish school) got her first “tattoo”; she pulled down her sock—one small dot.
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Dear _____ (obsession),
Perhaps scabs are the closest things I’ll get to tattoos, permanent markers which keep my existence tolerable.
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Rewind: I’m ten years older than my emo phase of life, yet, still faced with the same feeling of American individualism: trying to rebel, giving in to peer pressure I never thought I’d be reacquainted with. I remember going with an ex to get two major tattoos at a salon they’d be waiting months to get: an alien character from a video game, and on their shoulder, love. Not too long after, I take them to a flash sale, to get a bee on their elbow.
“Get one with me!”
“I’ll have to think about it…maybe next time.”
“You know, it’s funny. For all your talk about not giving a fuck about religion, you still stick to the rules. Come on, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Oh, but it would. I don’t like needles.” (What I meant was, “it would hurt my dad.”)
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What I meant was, I’d like to stay a little longer. Endure the pain a little longer.
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I’d like to say it was just the psychotherapy that resolved a lot of my body work, my daddy issues. But we all know that’s a lie.
1. The reenactment during my improvised scene play while reclining in the chair was just an illusion of control. With time, more understanding between my face and I, between my body and I, between my father and I. Coming out took off some layers of the veil, lifted off of my face, subdued the hiding, the weight of the body.
2. The weight of the body is always there, crushing my spine, my scoliosis, the straining uninterrupted hours sitting at my office desk. The intense workouts to compensate for that feeling of empty, to feel something, to suffer and imagine the number of calories I lost, only to drink a few gulps of a Coke and feel bad about myself all over again.
3. To keep repeating the same process, over again, to keep the obsession going. To keep forming the body into a plank of wood, so dense with muscle, you imagine yourself wanting to grabbing onto your body, so much so that you just end up punching yourself in the ribs, over and over again, just to feel something.
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4. A scar. A hard touch. A mark on the face, the wrist. Just to feel something.
