body

Dear aching body:

I have been meaning to write you for years. Wondering from time to time about our relationship. Sitting quietly in the lack of clarity, broken hearted, big quiet tears sneaking out of me. The truth is, I have learned to resent you and as I try to reconcile the reality of where we are today, I feel your pains and interpret them as war against me. And tonight I am sitting with those assumptions. Trying to listen to exactly what you're telling, trying to dig inside you/myself, for connection to us and our needs. As my right ovary throbs, and I feel my uterus thickening, and my back and legs tell me not to get up because today they can't support me, and my eyes swell with heavy reminders of my pain, exhaustion, and inability to sleep without being consumed by terrors, I fumble for words, trying my hardest to type this word, then the next. Losing my sentences after every couple of syllables, and having to rebuild each thought at least three times before I get to a full stop.

We are so unlike the self we've been taught to imagine. We are unlike the strength we've been taught to value. And I think of you, and all of the magic you've made. The things you've created, the love you've given, your softness, endurance, the ways in which you've encased me, protected me, held me and my secrets, let me feel love, taught me to digest pain, held sorrow until it subsided, so deep in my core. Housed my joys, and hopes and dreams. Housed me: the child, the teenager, the young adult, the person tangled in their Saturn return. The addict, the lover, the hellraiser, the glamour, the despair. You covered in glitter and grins and smiles, appearing to the world a pretty shell for a complex and sometimes hidden being. You hide me. No one can see me and the pain, the feeling of pushing, hands and feet pressed against my bones, grasping at one organ then the next with hard, tight fist-no one can see that. And therein lies the conflict: I feel like you're hurting me and hiding me and making it impossible for even me to see myself.

And so, how do we mend? I'm not asking for you to stop hurting, I can't ask that of you. It is unfair, unrealistic. I want to understand why, I want to understand how, I want to see you. I want you to see me. I want to learn to be kind to you, relearn how to love you, remember what it's like to be embodied, to feel powerful in you, to feel beautiful in you. I want to celebrate you, nourish you, let you be and ride with it. I want to be one with you, like we've never been. Like I've always dreamed.

I miss you.