You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

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. We had both gotten so used to me being stronger, reasonable, and having the resources to yield that I yielded by default, the idea of my own strength making me the weaker one.

He was thickening the moment by laying fantasy upon reality upon fantasy. Any two people stuck to each other in the present made for a wasteland. He was repopulating the act so that we would not be so alone in it together.

It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself.