You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

Under her scrutiny I felt the weight of my own presence constantly and grew tired, irritated by myself, so that day by day I waited a little longer before coming out of my room in the morning, trying to postpone reentering the construct of my life.

I didn’t know what I was afraid of. Maybe that in accepting this chunk of B’s body, I would be diluting myself further, when already it was taking me minutes each morning to remember who I was, how I had gotten there.

he always assumed I was happy, too, even when I wasn’t. With C, I could sit there and cycle through hurt, anger, sadness, ambivalence, acceptance, all without disturbing the comfortable rapport between us. As a result, he called me easygoing. And at times when the inner corners of my eyes burned and I knew I was about to spill, I had only to look over at him and his utterly normal grin to feel like I had grossly misread my own situation. Then whatever feeling I was feeling would hollow itself out, so that all I felt was that I no longer knew what I felt.

A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.

I felt like snow, I thought, like snow feels: cold and quiet and close to vanishing. A temporary covering on a small piece of ground.

knew then that we were going to have a fight. I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else. I wanted to return to myself hours later with no real memories, only a vague feeling of having floated. But what I wanted wasn’t something that I could have: my life, the process of living it out, was undelegatable, intransferable.

This is a landscape made by human beings, but not for human beings. Walk it and you always step someplace identical to where you stepped before. You can’t get anywhere on foot. Cross it in a car and the surroundings slide by until you realize that you’ve seen them all before,

Feed a man a fish and he’ll imagine himself content, allow him to purchase a wide range of non-fish items and he will feed for days.

“You’re like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it. Wouldn’t you rather love what is right for you instead? Wouldn’t you like to find out what that is?”

we believe that there is nothing more hazardous to yourself than being yourself. That burden should be shared. We believe that the quickest route to self-improvement is self-subtraction.

There was an uncontrollable amount of me within myself, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

We knew we were safe in here, or we thought we were, or we felt we were, or we wanted to feel we were.

living wasn’t a matter of right or wrong or ethics or self-expression. There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly.