Muscle. Memory. 30 Love Letters. Day 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October is the hardest month to be in my body. Muscle memory. It is a guide. A protection. A haunting. 

October taught the word rape. Twelve years ago. Still right now. Today. Still learning. The reach of it. Still reclaiming. That sharp sort of hollow.  

October is muscle memory. And my muscle, this memory, I do not want them joined. Not any longer. I want my body. Unwritten. Free. A creation. Just for me. It is a child’s wish. An innocence. A grief.  

And grieving is a life’s work. It is an honoring. A dignity. A power. That can never be taken. Never be given up. Never. My body. Integrity. It will not erase what has been survived. It will not change the truth of the story.  

Instead it will guide. It will protect. It will haunt. It will remember. It has never. Surrendered. Anything.

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The Weight Of Our Bones. 30 Love Letters. Day 3.

Dear Body,

What a classed thing we are. It is a tricky articulation. The way large bodies speak home to me. Speak my bloodline. My class. My region. Woman. Working class. Ohio.

Fatness. A part of life. But not without shame. And I wonder now where that shame came from. What it was. Was it the weight of our flesh? The girth of our bodies? The stretch of our skin? Or was it the poverty.

Our bodies were thick with holding. Salt of the earth. Never letting anything go to waste. Storing each and every bit for a rainy day that always came.

No excess to speak of. Yet treated as excessive. Too fat. Too loud. Too crude. We never minced our words. Only people with too much make something small for show. An amuse bouche. But we knew to always find pleasure in a full mouth.

Still, we understood. We knew that thin spoke more than pretty. It spoke to a power, a leisure, we would never access. And maybe shame was just cover for jealousy. Shame can live quiet in your guts. But jealousy is a defeat. An admission of not enough. A truth pride could not allow.

And so we hated our skin, instead of our lack. We let them call us too much, when we knew the cost of not enough. We watched the weightlessness of wealth. While we carried our reserves on our bones.


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