I am pored, haired, often oozing somewhere or other and sometimes objectively disgusting in my private habits in the way nobody cares to admit. As neither a result of nor in spite of this, I am a woman. I am alive. I am able to read a poem and decide that it is beautiful... I am able to look at another porous and hairy thing and decide that it is beautiful... I don't know why I find this surprising.
Today I feel brainless. I am at a total loss for what to do, and so I write. Sitting on my bed in the quiet of my room, I can hear all the little sounds my body makes-- the squelch and crack of my joints, click of my jaw, the tiny gurgle in my throat after I take a sip of water from the cup on the bedside table beside me. I roll my ankle around and hear the bones click in their sockets.
My computer begins to whir on my lap and I immediately make a mental comparison between the computer and my body. A worn out kitten sticker is embedded on the metal next to the mousepad, faded and peeling at the edges. The keys chatter like teeth under my fingers; I pause and fiddle with the "I" key trying to shift a crumb which has become trapped there. Click click click.
Where does my computer end and the body begin? How much of my body have I left on, inside my computer? The cracks and vents must be filled with microscopic fragments of my skin that have been shed from my hands. Surely it smells of me, carries my pheromones, the residue of my sweat. This computer wears a coat of me. How delightfully disgusting! How hilarious our bodies are, constantly falling apart and leaving pieces everywhere, as if these spores will spread and fester into mushrooms. I am reminded of a quote from Aracelis Girmay:
In my copy/pasting, the font has changed. I figure I will leave it that way as I have no idea how to change it. The gooey afternoon light continues to seep through the clouds like grey saliva. At some point during the process of typing this, a hair has detached itself from my head and now lies diagonally across my computer screen.
"such is the resiliency of man that he can become fascinated by ugliness which surrounds him everywhere and wish to transform it by his art into something clinging and haunting in its lovely desolation." -- from the unabridged journals of sylvia plath, pp. 35
Today I feel brainless. I am at a total loss for what to do, and so I write. Sitting on my bed in the quiet of my room, I can hear all the little sounds my body makes-- the squelch and crack of my joints, click of my jaw, the tiny gurgle in my throat after I take a sip of water from the cup on the bedside table beside me. I roll my ankle around and hear the bones click in their sockets.
My computer begins to whir on my lap and I immediately make a mental comparison between the computer and my body. A worn out kitten sticker is embedded on the metal next to the mousepad, faded and peeling at the edges. The keys chatter like teeth under my fingers; I pause and fiddle with the "I" key trying to shift a crumb which has become trapped there. Click click click.
Where does my computer end and the body begin? How much of my body have I left on, inside my computer? The cracks and vents must be filled with microscopic fragments of my skin that have been shed from my hands. Surely it smells of me, carries my pheromones, the residue of my sweat. This computer wears a coat of me. How delightfully disgusting! How hilarious our bodies are, constantly falling apart and leaving pieces everywhere, as if these spores will spread and fester into mushrooms. I am reminded of a quote from Aracelis Girmay:
"When the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! If I leave my hair in the comb in my mother’s house & walk out the door to go to the airport, then all of a sudden the body is everything between me & that lost piece. The body is made up, then, of roads & crickets & azucena & mud. How large we are. How ramshackle, how brilliant, how haphazardly & strangely rendered we are. Gloriously, fantastically mixed & monstered. I have been asking myself to be more attentive & porous–to pay attention to the way every inch of me is animal, every inch of me is earth. I am trying to remember this. Where is my cloud? Where is my sea? What do the lungs hunt? What does the eye have in common with the teeth?"
In my copy/pasting, the font has changed. I figure I will leave it that way as I have no idea how to change it. The gooey afternoon light continues to seep through the clouds like grey saliva. At some point during the process of typing this, a hair has detached itself from my head and now lies diagonally across my computer screen.
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