You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

I felt that I was experiencing the world as only someone who did not exist in it could.

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.

“I worry about you sometimes,” he said. “Everything gets you so bothered. You need something really bad to happen, to put it all in perspective. Or, I guess, for nothing bad to happen for a long time,” he conceded.

But when I tried to think it through, think about what I would prefer to eat instead, all I could see was oranges, all I could taste was oranges. It was as if my mind were the exact size of an orange.

My breath slowed and I felt like I might lie down and never get up. I realized that I was feeling happy.

“Oh,” he said. “I think a lot of relationships with females have weirdness built into them. Like with mothers. And sisters, and friends. In that way, weirdness is normal. So what’s happening is normal.

I needed to become the ideal person I had come here to be, a person who wasn’t.