This Is Your Body If You Want It
Finally, I’m happy with the skin I’m in.
My first memory of food is my mother trying to pry the tines of a fork into my mouth. Her pleas were quiet and urgent, and it was a rare thing to see my mother cry. She was impenetrable, violent, and beautiful. Tears are the dominion of children, but it was as if I were birthed bone-dry — capable of sorrow, but unable to weep for it. That morning, before he woke before he would part the beaded curtain that separated their bedroom from where I slept before I would enter that room when my mother wasn’t in it before he would break me, break things, I remember staring at my mother as she tried to work food in me and feeling nothing.
I am five.
Back then, my mother was bone-thin. Body taut from waiting tables, charming customers, counting tips. Smoking through a pack of Kent 100s, fishing through it, finding a smoke, lighting another. This was before the cocaine and peach pies rotting under the bed. She was a woman who moved and I liked the look of her. The way she was thin, yet far from frail, and the possibility of her edging out of the frame.
And I wanted my magic tricks, wanted to disappear. Not to part the beaded curtain, not to remember how the lamps in the room lit them up like fire, not to remember the colors of the beads, even now, after all…
