I had a body once before. I didn’t always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. Days I wanted to claw my way out of the earth, out of this shell. To become something else, something as yet unseen, untethered. To take flight.
I knew better than to wish for this.
A light went off in a house as I brushed against its fence, a light I barely registered. Jangled day-thoughts burst and faded, brief as insects. The night was humid. I hunched myself smaller, eyes down. A familiar footpath scrolled beneath my feet. I knew my body in the world: the weight of it, the way it hit the uneven cement, how it felt to step across the place where the roots under the asphalt showed as blisters. We had a history together; we had a culture. I possessed myself.
I was three blocks, then two from where I lived. Lived there just long enough for this walk to be a habit; the body remembered the way. I might have been stalling, walking more slowly, making sure it got late. I know I wanted to be alone, to enter the house undisturbed.
Mind afloat, I counted the pools beneath streetlights: seven, six. Long shadow, short shadow, long. Pink graffiti in the white cut of tree where a branch was sawn and taken, a new wound. Warm scent of night flowers. An ache where the toe roughed against the shoe. The heat gathered at the tips of the ears. Slight gut discomfort, gases in process, but nothing specific enough to call hunger. The house key cutting into one thigh through the fabric of a pocket, jeans too tight. The hum of wires, and five pools of light.
That body was always a little alert, a little vigilant. It was part of who I was then, what I carried: memories of how others saw and described me. The fact of being watched. I had absorbed it into how I moved, let it become me. I no longer thought about it.
Adam had disturbed my surfaces. But even after his transgressions, after the vigil, I thought I was safe enough. I did not feel followed, or observed. If there were signals – a prickle of hair at the nape of the neck, a sharpening in the heart, a sudden chill, or a tickle of sweat in the hand – then I accepted them as normal. If these alarms were sounding inside me, they were so familiar that they had become faint and distant. My body let me down because of what it knew.
Four pools. One cicada trilling in the artificial light. Feet behind me, at a distance. I did not look back. There was so much I felt without noticing. So much I missed, counting lights, counting my steps. I was hardly aware of myself at all. A body isn’t there until something goes wrong.
There was a small sound, a rip in the air at my neck. I must have smelled them then, or felt their breath. Too close to my surface. Too swift to judge if I knew them.
Fear shot through me. I felt it wake in every ready cell. Blood in the mouth, the wet of nostril. Oxygen running under skin.
Two hundred steps from home.
Time stopped to let sensation take hold. I saw and felt the shape I had: I lived fully in the earth of it. I lifted my head, if only to feel its motion. Every detail of an exquisite, co-ordinated system. The mutual exchanges of bones, blood, muscle. Home. Alert to life, I felt at last what delicate machinery the body was, how complex and improbable and necessary. Its gifts of circulation, respiration, sustenance, that returned this rich awareness. The news of myself was an extravagance. A perfect form, I was, if I had only known. All this in the space of a breath – and there was a soundless kick-drum contact, an asphalt length against a blur too near.
fall, falling. Back of the head.
(grunts and drunk scents, sweat)
the eyes went for a white moment, contents tipped out, nonsense
(what sharp rib this)
the sense of harm arrived before pain
(and gut. two or. laughing or)
so violence seemed continuous with being
(shit, man, running)
which I knew. My face on a dark path.
Are they running? Am I?
I heard no sirens. Felt no hands
not breathing. Clear the airways
So it went: with the body that possessed me, the nothing that was all I knew.