You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

IS IT TRUE THAT WE are more or less the same on the inside?

The heart from my body could be lifted and placed in yours, and this portion of myself that I had incubated would live on, pushing foreign blood through foreign channels. In the right container, it might never know the difference.

At night I lie in bed and, though I can’t touch it or hold it in my hand, I feel my heart moving inside me, too small to fill the chest of an adult man, too large for the chest of a child.

Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong. Anything could be inside.

It’s no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.

When I caught a glimpse of my body, tangled and pale, it felt as if there were an intruder in my room. But as I dressed and put on makeup, touched the little tinted liquids to my skin and watched the hand in the mirror move alongside my own, I rebuilt my connection to the face that I took outside and pointed at those around me.

Like the moon, my mouth in the mirror seemed to look a little bit different each day. It was summer, and the heat hadn’t yet tightened around our bodies, making us sticky and moist, trapping us in a suit we hated to wear.

I liked letting noise from the neighborhood leak into my sleep and begin turning things real. I liked it, except when I hated it,

It was a safe neighborhood. There was nothing you could complain about without sounding crazy. The sun was bright outside and I heard birds hidden in the trees, swarming the bushes with sounds of movement, calling out, bending small branches beneath the weight of their small bodies.