Bodyless
I read Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays, eyes flickering in the dark of my room. I starve the flesh, as suggested. On the occasions when I give in to want, I eat uncooked noodles, bread dipped into warm sunflower oil, peanut butter by the spoonful. My stomach churns and clenches, desperate to digest. I lay motionless for hours until my spine gives in to stationary pain.
In the quake of winter, I don’t notice the cold of my room until my acquaintance refuses to enter it.
“You might as well be sleeping outside.”
That night, I piece together that the headaches I get while sleeping are a result of my blood vessels tightening from the cold. This knowledge has no consequence on my actions. When I am in apartments with loud heating on, my throat shuts, and I become more raisin than human, peeling my many layers and leaving early without a viable explanation. No sweat can be produced in the absence of water. I shrink to my bare essentials.
“Food makes me sleepy, tired,” my coworkers sit in silent anticipation of me grabbing a plate to join them, but I never do so. I sit with them at dinnertime, smiling, talkative, over-gesticulating to distract.
“You know, food also gives you energy, you need it to survive.”
I smile at this suggestion pretending to jot it down in my thoughts: “You’re completely right.”
My lover touches my body sweetly, tentatively. She is full of vigor and tenderness. Tight elastic skin wrapped around my frame. Beneath the fuzziness of the blankets, she informs me that I am beautiful, hand sticking to my flesh like different colors of playdough mixing. In a lot of ways, this is the most painful of acts. I’ve read in Aliens and Anorexia that a body becomes unexcitable after enough starvation. Reproduction becomes a process it cannot facilitate and survival, one of utmost importance. Everything else is secondary. My research proves the contrary to be true: I can only get wet and hard in spiky frost on an empty stomach. As the temperature rises, I feel my mind wandering off, becoming aware of itself and its container.
Suicide was like skin picking; I had an itch for it. I would practice it in small ways that would hurt me mildly for a brief moment and change my trajectory for the long run.
“A body isn’t developed until the age of 25,” my parent says, scorning the dark under my eyes, the lack of cheeks and blood rushing through them.
After three and a half years, the body I inhabit issues me an eviction notice. I ponder on the ethics of it, to be kicked out of your own body. I offer it store-bought sweets, desperate for the slightest of nods in approval. It spits out my offerings, like sewage spurring from rusty pipes. At night, it startles me awake with faux noises. I never find any evidence of what could have produced those sounds. Its fingertips grow weak, blue and purple at the root of the nail. Stairs prove an indiscernible high, a horizontal halo of cartoon stars ringing around my head.
I go to the municipality demanding bureaucratic answers. The employee shows me, with the patience of a caretaker, that under the laws of self-regulation, a body has every right to kick out its holder. If such laws didn’t exist, bodies would be vulnerable to being taken advantage of. I leave with “thank-yous” of a desperate con artist, my smile washing away from the warmth of the waiting room.
I sign up for those body rehabilitation courses, but only attend two classes, certain that I can do this better. I exercise each day until it must lie down on the yoga mat like a horse that’s been shot. This way, the body has no time to rest.
The good can come in vicious overabundance just as easily.
I write the body an ode, thinking if it doesn’t appeal to seduction of the flesh, it must fall prey to this. My ears clip like Nokia call melodies. I give the body many lovers, they kiss and grab its skin with immeasurable lust. They praise it well. The body grows smaller each day, an attempt to flush me out.
The body, after one too many days of staring at my lover apply body lotion to her body, throws me out. I feel none of the physical sensations of eviction, and soon I start to miss feeling my fingers going numb, my shape feeling loose and malleable, my teeth hollow during chatter. Recreating the feelings in my mind proves no satisfaction. I am bodyless.
At first, I don’t mind it. I exist in all spaces I want to. I am an electricity socket dipped in water, all-encompassing. But I cannot see, I cannot smell, taste, jerk off. Much of my existence is pondering on existence. Floating between the space of all matter. More boundless than bodyless, I suppose.
Many people like me end up this way. The government has a system in place for us as they are one to do. But it is hard to follow it if you’ve been left bodyless even once. Without the body dictating that you are in one location, memory becomes irrelevant. Everything is happening everywhere and all of the time. All the bodyless people’s minds intermingle like the gummy bears I’ve melted in a pot at age seven. Much to my parent’s disappointment, and my delight.
My thoughts are porous. They soften with ease. Who I was becomes as ancient and irrelevant as Babylon.
I, among many others, am on a list. Like patients awaiting organ donors. Restless.
My case jumps up, as many bodyless people’s minds have diluted themselves into unrecognizable patterns. They’ve dissolved. A body-issued policy for making people disappear. And approved by the one and only ruling body, the government. No citizens gathering to protest for us when they don’t even know we remain.
My body, or so I’ve been told, has a new owner. And I too, am an owner of a new body.
My greasy fingers hold onto its fragile frame. The nurse informs me that I will heal just fine, but that anyone else would have been stuck here for much longer. The hospital food smells of hand sanitizer and cotton swabs. My mouth tastes metallic and powdery. She crushes my painkillers and dilutes them in water, with calloused fingers bending the plastic cup without even trying.
I self-medicate for months after, rummaging through the stale underwear drawers of the bedroom. They don’t give you a manual for a new body, let alone a list of drugs you’re supposed to take. Nothing in me can remember. My life is as simple as breaking into a fit whenever I try to.
The pill bottle grows empty like a tic tac container.
The municipality tells me I need to be patient, the adjustment process is arduous and long.
I nod without ever agreeing.
My hands gradually start to take what they need. When I will eventually get stopped, the body will know what to say. It lies when it needs things, never recreationally. And I am learning to follow its lead.
END
