This Body

This morning, putting cream on my face, my hands in a cradle, cupping its cheeks like a child’s. Old face. Sweet face. Tired face. Later, I stepped from the shower and saw my naked body in the mirror. The sagging skin at the neck. The scar at the brow. The ripples under the eyes. The dark spots on the chest. The breasts, one high, one low, one scarred, one not. The marks across the belly from carrying two at once. The ass that has disappeared. The legs that have managed their best, more than any other part, not to age.

And then of what I cannot see. The dried ovaries, void of eggs, hanging limp, stage left and stage right, over the empty theater of the womb. And the hole where the appendix was, what has taken its place? What of the butterfly at the throat, still there, yet shriveled in her chrysalis. And the brain, that transistor radio for spirit — sometimes tuned in, sometimes playing static — most mysterious of all.

This body. This battleground. This tattered playing field. This warn strip of runway from which to launch and land, land and launch.

Most of my time here, I’ve done my best to brush this body aside. My impetus has been all launch. I came here remembering the freedom of bodiless flight, and every chance I could, I’d lift off out of it — down the hallway, out a window, through a wall — and soar in the air powered by nothing but my will to do so. I could not forget this, and I am glad of it, though it made landing here take nearly the full span of a lifetime.

But I have landed. My feet are on the ground. And I feel them there. The muscles that have held the tension of my constant-leaving have relaxed into a settled-staying. And I am learning to fly with the body. I am learning that there is an endless undiscovered universe inside each of us and that the only way to explore its vastness is through the portal of the body. And this is why we come. Just as the body has senses that see and hear and feel and taste and smell the objects of the world outside, so there is the body that senses the forms of the world inside. And now that I have found this world, and it has found itself in me, I hope this body will live long enough to explore as much as it can muster, this warn strip of runway from which to launch and land.