You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

In this way I measured the amount of life that had been extracted from me by loving someone, in person, face-to-face.

the sense her body gave off that living was a wet and collapsing struggle.

An orange wasn’t a type of food so much as another entity, looking out for its own interests, secretive and sealed, hiding its insides from the outside world.

The things that have gone wrong inside of you are whispering to each other beyond your hearing, too softly to stir

INSIDE A BODY THERE IS no Light. Blood piles through with no sense of where it goes, sliding past inner parts, parts that feel something but know nothing about what they feel. What they sense they send up through nerve channels to the brain, a cavefish-pale organ with no nerves of its own. Inside a body, thoughts that never touch air, never reach Light, thoughts that end in a suffocating Dark.

the younger lived far better in heaven with his knife at his side, singing knife-songs to the heavenly gathering and putting holes in the angels, one by one.

Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.

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.

Nothing in there looked out at me, all the objects stared deeply into themselves.