My body is my home

After all these years, I’ve won it back

My body is my home. 

I moved in January ’05. I like soft and loose clothes. My favorite evenings are ones spent with long walks in rainy weather while listening to Lana’s music. 

When I was 13, a guy down the street said he was moving into my body. I was to be out by 3. I had to leave what was soft and round at the door, the rest I could take. My body was His now. 

After my eviction I found myself in the Abyss outside my body. All around me, other disjointed women, stretching out over time. 

Surrounded here, I am alone. My gut caves into itself, painfully aware of the wholeness I once was. 

Later, I was invited back to His body. The man that moved in said he was lonely. I sit on the couch with him, gaps between my limbs still. I have been here for a while, doing the upkeep on His body. 

I know now it likes being in the rain. I calm it by playing a singer from the 2010s. Most days I wrap it in soft clothes and I take it on a walk. 

We pass by places it remembers. Some schools and homes and churches. I avoid those routes, as it takes us too long.  

In the Abyss there were whisperings of a revolution. I could retort, take the body out into the cold of night. The skin would shrivel and grow hair. It would no longer be beautiful but it’d be free. 

I’d disappear in the dirt and soil, my body reverting to the thing that it is, ugly and feral, an endangered animal in the woods, living unaware of its mortality. 

Or I could keep the body as His and stay here, in the gray monotony of daylight. In return I get the soft stares of strangers. 

I have chosen to lose myself in the night. I am clawing my way back into my body, feeling into the stolen skin and space. 

I find refuge in the trees and the water. In the things that cannot speak. Who make space for my unbecoming. Who do not ask me to be beautiful. 

I’ve made ugly my idol. Hoping over and over to sink fully into some grotesque mess. I thought I’d hate being outcasted. I feared the loss of love, I feared watching the earth lick its teeth. I thought it to much to bear. Really, I’ve never been more free. 

There is wind on my skin and I feel the world spinning. My body houses my soul and neither is being suffocated.

I take myself home. We walk, we eat, we dance. We scream, voice extending generations, at people we can no longer speak to. I have not made peace with Him, I do not plan to. 

I feed myself fruit. I listen to the AC. I go on night time drives. I hold myself. Nothing else to be except my home.