My Dear,
We are not born naked. we come into this earth blanketed in expectation, dressed in our parent’s hope and a world’s unnecessary fixation on our bodies.
Your body is like a stranger at war with itself. the battle wounds serve as a sign of survival and a reminder of perpetual danger. and your skin has long since become a repository of keloids.
It’s not a beautiful sight.
It’s said the best way to boil a frog is to put it in cold water and gradually increase the heat for otherwise it would jump out of an already pan. make its death so enjoyable it doesn’t even know it’s dying.
Sometimes I wonder,
is your body killing you or are you the one that’s slowly killing it?
On the days you feel disconnected from yourself, You look for refugees in old photographs to a time you assume was simpler. age has stripped you of your imagination so you make up scenarios of how you must have been feeling in that right moment, then.
One time you came across an old photograph of a child barely three standing naked inside a living room, with only shoes and a neckless around their neck meant to ward off the evil eye. their expression so delicate and a gaze so vulnerable it could penetrate your soul. baring everything.
But,
I couldn’t recognise it was you.
It felt so far ago. and the distance so deafening.
What is distance but a space, a barrier carrying within its mass, memories, salt? what is distance but a border, a demarcation made insignificant by the inherent ability of a living thing to grow by change? what is distance but the space between words that begin only to change their course? the beginning of a sentence altered by a three-letter word…
But,
But,
To be a black queer body is to be a circus act. bending and contorting your body to fit into boxes far smaller than your frame. to shrink.
To walk a tightrope struggling between freedom and Falling. to be conscious of your body, the space you hold and the ways in which you manifest your existence. to chip parts of yourself to hide to feel accepted to feel safe. to find yourself at the centre of conversations but never part of them. to feel undesirable. an outlet of others’ hatred others fear. a cumdump of their insecurities and pain. an object to be traded. bartered. bashed.
But,
This body is all that you have. plagued with insecurities as it is, it’s all that You know.
How then can you reconcile the tiny spark of hope that lives inside with the fraught silence that surrounds it – silence meaning not quite peace but nothingness. empty. like a shell.
It echos.
But
But this body is all I have, scars and all.
And no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body no body
No other body can be mine.