You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

It was lonely being the only one who knew how I was feeling, to not be stored in the mind of someone else who could remind you who you were.

She turned her blur of a face around toward me. I was trying to get my contacts in as quickly as possible, to decrease the resemblance between us by increasing the number of details I could discern.

Other people think that proofreading is just about changing incorrect things into correct ones, but it’s more complicated: it’s about holding language in place.

With a product like Kandy Kakes, the ingredients are spelled out for you on the wrapper—every part accounted for, its caloric and nutritional content tabulated. But what sorts of ingredients went into a piece of fruit? An orange wasn’t a type of food so much as another entity, looking out for its own interests, secretive and sealed, hiding its insides from the outside world.

“And you’re making a mess,” he added, swiping his arm around at the irregular blotches of beauty cream that marred the floor and stained my white sheet a thicker, heavier white. “Try being more like those around you,” he said as he walked away, “and less like yourself.”

I intended to know what I was doing and to do it perfectly. I pictured a perfect student and tried to resemble her physically.

With my butt sliding around on the leather-print plastic of the seats, I feel just like a child again, safe in the understanding that anything bad that were to happen to me would be someone else’s responsibility. Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.

If we were, as the choreographers told us, the worst dancers they had ever seen, did it mean that other people, people on the outside, were more whole than us? That they had done a better job of dwindling their Darkness and that they had done it all on their own, without needing the Church, because they were simply better at being people?

She was blond and about as pretty as she had looked on-screen, pretty in a pushy way: all of her features seemed to tell you she was attractive before you had a chance to gauge it yourself.

There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly.