What Can Our Bodies Do for Each Other?
Drugs, Death, Divorce, Sex, Abortion, Procrastination, and My Body.
I am writing this love letter to you, because the thing that I am supposed to be writing is scraping like sandpaper against my soul. It is haunting my home (and the long, creaky, cobwebbed hallways of) my brain like a ghost. But the presence of another ghost has made a home in my body, and my heart has jumped off a long, tall dock into a freezing, swirling ocean of all the ways—real and imagined— in which we could have used our bodies to see him, know him, love him, keep his body here and safe and upright and caring for other bodies in the ways only he knew how to do.
It’s a golden October morning.My friends are sending me memes from accounts called @jurtle_boi and @ptsd.eezenuts. My dog is curled and snoozing beside me, my iced coffee is iced-coffee-ing through my veins, my body is safe and warm and has been touched and loved and sung to by some of its favorite other bodies in all the ways it likes.
Yesterday was my dead ex-husband’s birthday. He would have turned 36. I woke up both looking and not looking for signs of him, for some tangible proof that he had a body. That his body once existed on this planet (and proof that my body existed only in relation to his for nearly a decade, beginning the year I turned 18). It doesn’t anymore, though, my body. His body isn’t here on earth with the rest of the bodies it played music with, argued with, was fed by, kissed, hurt, ignored, created, gave bottles of milk to. It never grew old. It doesn’t touch his mother’s body or his two childrens’ bodies or anyone else’s bodies, anymore.
I have a flight today for work, his sister—once and forever my sister, too, somehow, I don’t know why our love for each other works this way but it still does, though no court nor DNA test would allow it—texted me.
I told our mom I’d say happy birthday in the sky since I’ll be closer.
I thought about Ocean Vuong writing, The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. I thought about my sister’s body, hurtling through the clouds toward its next purpose. Mine wasn’t in the sky, though, yesterday. My body was here on earth, feeling heavier than ever.
I thought about what our bodies can give each other, while they’re still on earth together—a very very short time, in the end. I thought about the ways in which our bodies can care for one another, no matter if and how they feel like touching or being around each other that much. No matter the pain inflicted on one by the other. No matter the collisions, the bruises, the mismatched paces, the forgotten choreography, the distance we put between them.
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