body story

What is it like to live inside your skin? Do you avoid mirrors or look forward to your reflection in every storefront you pass? Do you live with pain? Do you bite your fingernails? Do you have a curve you admire? A Romanesque nose? A frog in your throat? As you consider today's prompt, try not to describe your body as an outside observer: I am 5 ft. 2 inches, etc. Rather, concentrate on one aspect of your body and write about it as if it gave you the exclusive rights to tell its story.



As a kid I loved folding myself into cupboards and under tables.* It all went wrong in 1997. I had slithered under my bed, whether to hide or just relax I can't remember, but next to the missing socks and plastic figurines, I lay on my stomach and experienced a sickly new soreness that drove me to standing, to sleeping on my back.
Sarah Lipski got them first. Mostly I wore baggy clothes so I escaped notice until Mark Jones' end of the year pool party. Why did I choose a bikini? At a sleepover, when I started changing into pajamas, Lauren Dunn screamed, turned, and hid her face.
My high school friends loved lingerie shopping and removing shirts at every opportunity. I found safety in their silliness. Laylee pressed me to a corner in the school hallway, squeezing, "You're not wearing a bra today!" I loved this attention.
But in almost all other contexts - cut them off. In my way. Decades spent flip flopping between baggy/binding "don't see" and braless challenge "fuck you."
I picked up the cat unprepared, he clambers up my shoulder to jump to a chair. I look down at the thin pink line puffing up on my skin. Ellie rushes for the neosporin. "My perfect titty!" Softest skin.
A far cry from too big, too saggy, too uneven, too pale, too strange,** unwieldy annoyance. We've come a long way together, but most of the time they're still too much.
At work I want them flat but it's hard to find a good buttondown without "boob gap." I still get ma'amed but that's not their fault.
I wonder, if I didn't have them, what my softest spot would be.


* I still love it, but it's harder now.
** I was born with a rare genetic condition that results in, amongst other things, whorled birthmarks.