Let's take the ballerina example. I keep thinking back to that limber age of five when I really did have the whole thing by a string, that perfect pointe-learning age when I could have been anything, but really one thing in particular we're talking about, the esteemed ballerina, when I was five, I could have started to be her, costumed and consumed within a life of dancing, of body-machining, of lipstick smearing and hamstring measuring and one-two-three-fouring, and a handful of image disordering, and a furrying back and a balding head, but beautiful, beautifying, I could have been just this wonderful dancing thing with fractured toes and a spine bubbling up out of the surface of the skin like some terrifying trilobite, a drying vagina and a nodding empty head, bobbing to the beat of that swelling orchestra moving in time beneath my feet, all for me, all for those performances, the ones that would have carried me through high school and college unthinkingly, just movingly, just following directions like a good little dancing duckling, and then landing me on some stage for a few golden years, batting my eyelashes and charting the strength of my thighs, all until just about now, this age that I'm in, when, should it have happened like that, my body would finally be giving in to the strain, giving up, done, finally. Right about now, if that had been me, I would be taking my final bow, waiving my last goodbye, catching my last bouquet and heading into bed, you've done it, you've earned it, pretty, just stop trying now, stop thinking, stop moving, enjoy the act of giving up, rest now, finally, resting assured that my body had reached its limit, done all it could, god bless you, you're beautiful, comforted by my body's done-ness, no more trying, no more thinking, just thanking. Just breathing. Just having had done everything I could in that world, everything my body allowed until this point, this glittering finish line, I've made it, I made it out just fine. But this is not what happened. This is not how it went. When happened is that I quit dancing when I was five, thinking I didn't have time for tutus. What happened is that I read books. What happened is I became infected by words and this disease spread quickly, making me think I was a thinker, an artist, an emotional intelligent, someone who writes, feels, moves with the mind and just happens to have a body, rather than the other way around--and I would turn it around in a heart beat, have my body dictate my life rather than my brain, because how devastating it is to know that the journey has just begun, that I am no where near done, that there is so much more trying left to do, so much more begging, but I would never turn it around, even if I could, if that meant that I couldn't have met you.
(k)
