Five About My Body: Parts

My body is a junk-shop chassis, a motor vehicle for the life and light inside me. It’s made from bits of this and that, stuffed calzone-like inside the dough of my skin, and pinched together at the seams by strong thumbs, warm and sweet and salty. It swells with air and water and food; it exhales as a sigh, and makes embarrassing noises, a bagpipe badly played.

My body is not a metaphor; it’s a literal thing, an object I own and inhabit. When I look at it, when I touch or think about it, I’m unsure how much is true and how much is imagined: Are my teeth really crooked, or am I looking through sideways eyes? Was that brown spot there before, the one I just noticed on the pad of my foot? Where are the other halves of my eyebrows?

When you notice your body, what do you see?

Photo by Flickr user Thunderchild07

Five About My Body: Thinning

“You do realize you’re like less than 1 percent of Americans with this problem, right? Everyone else is trying to lose weight.” My nutritionist pointed to the plastic plates covered in plastic food littered throughout her office; each one represented the suggested portion size of this or that—fish or grains, mashed potatoes or green grapes. “People make comments because they’re jealous of you, and they don’t know what you’re going through.”

I nodded and worried my fingers into a knot in my lap. Less than 1 percent of Americans wound up covered in their own sick on the tile floor of a hotel bathroom in Houston, Texas, having passed out stone cold from physical exhaustion and starvation? Less than 1 percent of Americans count every single calorie going into and coming out of their bodies, subsisting on boiled vegetables and apple-cider vinegar while obsessively running 10 or more miles every day in order to burn, burn, burn? Do they also still see fat rolls that don’t exist when the look in the mirror? Do they binge eat and blank out every night, their bodies so desperate for carbohydrates and protein that they practically shut down after cramming piece after piece of bread into their mouths?

One lousy percent of Americans. Lucky me.

Photo by Flickr user nataliej

Five About My Body: Tattoo

“This is going to be my last one,” I said to my tattoo artist. We were sitting in his new studio, in the basement of a parlor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; the walls still smelled like paint, in addition to the oddly intoxicating inky, bloody, sweaty animal smells that go along with tattooing.

“You say that every time,” he laughed, raising his eyebrow and tearing a piece of tracing paper off a long roll, getting ready to sketch. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Myles is the only person I’d trust to put a gun against my skin, and he’s been doing it off and on for me going on 10 years now. In fact, he’s one of the few people in the world I can honestly say I trust explicitly, though I don’t know him very well once I slide off the table at the end of a session. But he’s never built me up too much, and he never lets me down—how many people can any of us say that about? How many people would you let leave their permanent mark on your skin, on your life?

I’m guessing not too many.

“So, what are we doing?” he asked, poised with a blue pencil over a strip of tracing paper. I took a deep breath, giddy and nervous to tell him what I wanted, anticipating the first burn of the ink burying deep into my skin.

Finally, I blurted it out: “I want my dog’s head coming out of C.S. Lewis’s head, as though C.S. Lewis were a cocoon.”

Photo by Flickr user malikmalikmalik

Five About My Body: Rolls

The room slowly warmed with steam as the bath continued to fill, tiny silver-glittering bubbles forming in a foam on the top of the water. It was a treat on a Sunday night to have a bubble bath in place of the usual lather and rise, a quick soak to wash away the sour-sweet smell of Cheerios and apple juice, sticky between my fingers after a weekend of devil-may-care.

I loved to smell the bubbles as they multiplied in the tub; knowing it would take a while (seemingly an eternity) for the water to pool high enough, I’d begged my mother to let me sit beside the bath and wrap myself in that soapy smell, clean and white and warm. Agreeing, she stripped me naked and sat me on top of the closed toilet seat to wait. The cold porcelain against my butt and thighs made the anticipation even greater, almost frantic; I knew that I’d eventually feel the relief of the water warming every goose bump, and be submerged to my middle in a frothy kingdom of bubble ecstasy.

There’s no greater joy than being naked at three or four years old. Having already discovered your feet and hands at an earlier age, there’s a whole new world of skin and sensation to explore, a whole range of fine motor skills that allow a body to pinch and scratch, to poke and stretch and squeeze.

Photo by Flickr user sleepykisser

Five About My Body: Foot

If you think my feet are bad, you should see my mother’s: For all the running I do, for all the rocks and glass and trash I tread on, for all the calluses and the runner’s black toe, I’ve got nothing on my poor mother. Her big toes curl up and over the others as though trying to make a fist, as though saying, “Why, I oughta!” As though her feet would punch a guy for saying, “Hey, your feet are awful.”

My feet are also awful, however, and while some of it is genetic, much is self-inflicted: No socks, shoes without so much as a whiff of arch support, walking barefoot on the linoleum when I was a kid (despite my grandmother’s weird insistence that it would give me diabetes?), and a whole passel of amateur long-distance running experience has turned what might otherwise be dainty little princess digits into gnarly-ass bear claws, with pads as rough as leather and calluses so thick they tear almost instantly through stockings. (Not that I often wear stockings.)

In short, it served me right to inherit my mother’s bunions.

My actual feet; my actual, permanent screw