My body is so confusing to me.
Despite the way I treat it – drinking pretty much every day, smoking like it’s the 1950s, exercising only when the moon is in Venus – I can feel that underneath all that, it wants to be healthy. I went to an exercise class with my sister last weekend where a very taut man in a very tiny T-shirt shouted disco moves at us until we passed out, and the whole time I was thinking, I’m going to die, this is it, this is how I’m going to die. But I didn’t. And I should have, with the state my body should be in. Everytime I exercise I feel like it’s saying see, just look what we could do if you treated me better. My calves hurt for three days afterwards. Treat me better.
My body feels like this thing I carry around with me all day that I have no control over. I never know when it’s going to freak out for no reason. This morning when I got out of the shower I looked down and one of my legs had sprouted this horrendous scaly rash. I went to the pharmacy and asked the woman what the fuck it was (in the privacy of the consultation room. Did you know those exist in pharmacies?) and she said it looked like an allergic reaction to something. Had I eaten anything new, or changed body washes, or brushed up against anything poisonous: no, no, no. Well then, she said, it seems you might have developed an allergy to something you’ve been using all this time. The body can do that, you know. Great, I said. I suggest you throw out everything and start from scratch, she said. Seems to be the order of the day at the moment.
I’ve had problems with my stomach for about twelve years, since I caught norovirus from a stupid ex-boyfriend who told me he wasn’t contagious anymore. I used to have to stir weird things into my breakfast cereal every morning to try and control it. Did you know flaxseed doesn’t dissolve? Cocoa pops with flaxseed just tastes like cocoa pops with flaxseed. It’s also become an alarm bell of sorts – half the time I don’t even know I’m nervous about something until it starts griping and writhing and generally giving me a hard time. I can never tell if I’m actually ill or if I’m just worried about some amorphous thing that may or may not go wrong.
Sometimes my body feels like the most precious thing in the world, this thing that drags itself to all the places I make it go, these feet that pound the pavement on my increasingly regular walks to nowhere in an attempt to shake off the feeling that I’m barely stifling this wall of dread inside my brain. And sometimes it feels like this useless sack of organs that I give away to men I meet on the internet. This guy I hooked up with a million years ago once said Your body is almost perfect. Which at the time I thought was a compliment but have since realized it was in fact not.
I went swimming this morning. Swimming always makes me feel so clean, like a baby chick that’s just hatched. I bobbed up and down at one end of the pool, looking at my ghostly skin under the water with all its snaking blue veins. The water makes it feel like your body weighs nothing, like it’s not even there.
One good thing:
I saw The Lost Daughter this week and it was so fucking good it blew the top of my head off. My sister and I spent the whole journey home just screaming THAT WAS SO GOOD at each other.
One bad thing:
The evening we went to go see it I had some time to kill while I waited for her to get off work so I had a sad burger and a glass of wine in a pub nearby and read my book. This guy came in and sat down at the next table and also ordered a sad burger while he read his book. I thought to myself wow, this would be the best meet-cute ever, but then when his burger came he made the sign of the cross over it before eating it and I was like ah yeah, maybe not.
Maybe Ferrante is for you after all!