On my couch, surrounded by wobbly towers of books about loneliness and state-sanctioned oppression, we talked for an hour about how I thought the body was a human invention, a ruse, a story that’s easy to digest. I told him about how it had been easy to pretend the sounds of the brutal earth weren’t mounting to a crescendo around me. I didn’t care if my woundedness was unsexy. All of this was ugly work.
