You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

“It just happened on me,” she replied. “It wasn’t hard work.”

There’s a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself.

Maybe she was saving her stomach for something that didn’t yet exist.

I hung close above one group, casting my shadow over their swarming, and I waited to see some sign that would tell me whether they were caring for one another or just eating.

“They die in sugar,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It’s the best possible death for an ant.”

This is happiness, I thought as the air-conditioning droned behind me like a single monstrous insect.

What was it that made one person go nuts while the rest of the world remained intact around them?

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.

The television speakers rattled softly with the force of their own output.

My face in the mirror looked like someone else’s staring back at me through an open window in her own bathroom, and all I could think was that hers looked very much my own, only much more tired.

They didn’t want the gift-curse of recognition by those they loved and who loved them back, one consequence of that love’s durability being that they would be recognized and loved aggressively even on days when they couldn’t stand to recognize themselves in the mirror, even on days when merely remembering themselves made them sad and want to sleep.

That’s why I’ve always been so scared of putting makeup on, that I’d do all that work and end up looking like myself, exactly like myself but with things smeared on me.

“Why,” I asked, “are you trying to cure me of something I feel?”

Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.