Define: "Body Issues"

My stomach tightens, I am a flower that sings and dances circles around Snow White. I wanted to be a dwarf, I wanted to be Dopey, but I got stuck being a flower. Pink paper petals surround my face. My mother on the side watching our Kindgergarten Snow White performance. I watch the witch’s mother, skinny, in tight clothes. Snow White’s mother in a short white skirt, skinny as well. I look at the mothers, all are skinny with one chin. My mother the size of two or three of them and has two or three chins. My stomach tightens. I can hear their thoughts when they look at her, “The elephant lady”, I’m telepathic, my grandmother taught me. She’s there too. She’s overweight, but that’s okay, because she’s a granny. She’s (my mother) in turquoise with golden sequins and turquoise eye makeup. Telling everyone look at me I am a circus elephant. I do not want to talk to her when the play is over. I am hoping no one will know she is my mother. She is an elephant. Age 4

My third hot dog dripping with mayo and ketchup. My stomach hurts I cannot eat anymore. I look at the two hot dogs left on my plate. I stuff the third one in my mouth and swallow. I shovel the other two faster than my stomach can tell my brain that it will burst

H shows me where he will build the glass elevator in our garden. He is white, like a moving piece of lard. He eats meat for breakfast, rare and loves the fat. His skin smells like uncooked meat. He shows me the wall where the glass elevator will be. He grabs my bony wrists and pins me up against the wall. Pressing his mouth on mine, his cheeks cover blocking my nostrils when I try to inhale. He lifts my shirt and traces my jutting ribs with his tongue. His hair smells like fat. My ribs remember. Age 7

Holed up in our darkness, we quarrel. She leaves for class. I call Pizza Hut, they will not deliver till another hour. I order a New Yorker with extra cheese. I finish it in 6 minutes. I lie down feling the energy pulsatting in my stomach, radiating all over my body. She comes back to our darkness, she touches my breasts. We quarrel, she leaves. I order another New Yorker with extra cheese. I lie down by the door next to two empty boxes of pizza. I touch my stomach. I touch my breasts, I close my eyes and I rest

I am the daughter of a red indian. Like the chief from Peter Pan. I have a long headdress with red feathers going down my back. I am wearing a leather vest opened. My chest exposed but its okay because I don’t have breasts yet. I am tied up, wrists behind my back to the bed post. H is a cowboy he has a beard painted on his face. His hands touching me all over feel like they don’t have bones just flesh that smells of fat. Age 8

She ties the strings of her leapord print corset, tightening them around my waist. She traces her fingers across my clavicle. My pussy dries and her’s drips I held my breath and her’s got heavier. “You look so sexy”she looks at me, I look away. The door is locked so her father doesn’t come in, I can’t get out.

Pink with golden glitter and a frill around the waist, the swimsuit around my body. French cut. I feel my like everytime I walk I’m going to get a wedgy. My uncle in a black tight swimsuit is on the chaise long. He has boobs that he doesn’t cover. I have boobs too. He has three stomaches when he sits down, I have only one. My boobs are the size of pingpong balls half embedded into my chest. I cover them. “You look so sexy”.

“What’s sexy?”

“It means people want you”

“What does people want me mean?” Age 11

A boiled gray chicken infront of my mother at the dinner table, my father and brother’s plates overflowing. Everyone has breasts and their bellies are hanging. A napkin is laid out on my lap, I secretly drop the food on it. I have no belly and I have no breasts.

I wore my mom’s bikini from the 70s, its cool. It has these funky circles and its yellow, green, purple and orange. Its not much just a few strings tied together around my body. My breasts fill the cups. The bottoms are a little bit loose. I wander as I always do, my diary and a pencil. I am trying to find a special place. Somewhere no one has seen. Somewhere I can record something profound and significant. I find a pool and next to it a big net. The kind you can fish things out with. He comes up from behind me. I don’t know him. I feel his arms around my waist I look down his hands are dark and his knuckles are chaffed. The synthetic material of his shorts makes the skin on my back itch, but his belly cushions my back. One hand cups my breast the other one slides into my bottoms. In broken English he says “You are so sexy”. I don’t record this in my diary, but I never wear a bikini again. Age 14

Recall: Emptiness

“Where did this emptiness come from?” I ask myself, playing the role of the therapist. I’ve been to so many, I’m at number 12 and still counting, I have the jargon down, the intonations, the gestures and the facial expressions. I smile at myself compassionately.

“Well, I guess it’s because I wasn’t nurtured by mother” I state matter-of-factly, devoid of quivering lips and tearful eyes. Well I must have said this a million times. To at least 12 different therapists, constantly repeating the exact session with a different therapist

Sometimes it would be repeated with the same therapist. I guess, sometimes they run out of paper, or pencils and don’t take notes and just don’t remember

I raise one eyebrow in response, “What about your lovers? Don’t they nurture you?”

“Well, yes they do”

“So?”

I reflect on nurture. I hate nurture. I crave nurture. I hate it because I crave it, I resent you when you give it to me, because I want it. I don’t want to want it and most of all I don’t want you to give it to me.

“What do you mean by nurture?”

“I don’t know?”

“What does nurture feel like?”

“Warm”

I recall nurture, radiating warmth. Abstract, far, different in every context. Different from one person to the other. In a sense it is not there, cannot be boxed. Fills up and assuages chronic feelings of emptiness. Recall, reminding my cells how it feels to be in contact with your cells. You being, the last 3 people I thought I was in love with. Allowed our cells to communicate. I recall and the screaming emptiness is pacified. Temporarily. Appetizers, leaving me somewhat satisfied, but craving, more, cellular communication, cellular warmth.

“Is there a way to completely fill that emptiness?”

I go back into my memory, my grandmother nurtured me. My father nurtured me. I feel grateful, but I am looking for something else. My mother, a mixture of holding me close and pushing me away. Cliché? Maybe. I feel insecurity. I remember insecurity is not a feeling. I feel insecure and helpless. I feel warm, then I feel empty. I feel compassionate. Something happened, I want before that time, before the ambivalence. Before she would love me and then push me away. I feel it, fleeting an instant. Recall, the instant where the infinite regression halts. Where I am no longer searching, I hold onto it. My mother, no cigarette between her lips, fresh soapy smell. No smoke hanging around us. She can love me because I just am. She can love me because the fucking therapists can’t label me. She can’t label me, she can’t judge me, because I just am. I am filled.

Infinitely regressing. I let go of this fulfillment, I want to go deeper, I am curious about my birth. The glaring lights. The latex gloves. My mother holds me, takes me in her arms, exhausted. My father holds me up. My memories are tainted by cognitive biases induced by captured Kodak moments. I remember the pictures, the one where they handed me to my mother, the one my father holds me, and the one my father passes me to my grandmother. I cannot recall, but I can pretend I do. Somehow it seems important to remember the moment I came into the world. To recall, why it was I made this decision to come here, that there was some life affirming drive. That I wanted to beat all odds to come out of my mother and live. There had to be a choice to live, and I had to have taken it. I need to recall that choice, affirmation to live. A deterrent to recurrent suicidal ideation.

The contractions in her womb scared me, every contraction reminded me of the choice, I can choose to stay or I can choose to leave and live. Every contraction I had to decide. Every moment of indecisiveness led to a surge of oxytocin and another contraction prompting me to make my choice. My mother said I slipped right out, her contractions were short I came out with ease. In the last minute I try and stop coming out. I wrap the chord around my neck. Her vagina opens easily, like the trapdoor on a hangman, the chord tightens around my neck as I slip out from between her legs. Till this day I can’t bear to have anything around my neck. I can debate whether it is because this is a constant reminder of my utter failure at my first suicide attempt, or a life affirmative survival instinct.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant till the sixth month, when I was going to lose you” Many times my mother has told me how she didn’t know I was there till she nearly lost me, many times I’ve told this story to people. Hoping someone would find some significant hidden meaning. I hid in her womb for 6 months. Recall, warm, encompassing, private. A secret sexually transmitted parasite. The panic is unleashed, not mine, hers, her adrenaline passing through me, widening my vessels and pushing my thimble sized heart to pump faster. She was losing me, she didn’t know she had me, but wanted me when she was going to lose me. I wasn’t scared.

I was being private, curled up secretly in my mother’s uterus, another survival tactic, maybe. I was being secretive when my fat ugly maid Rabha, which means breadwinner, would pull me by my ankles, the fat rippling on her arms, her breasts sagging down lower than her waist. She would pull me by the ankles off the bed. I would hit my head. She always smelt of a mixture stagnating sweat trapped under synthetic material, Samna baladi and Lemon fragranced Prill. She takes me into her arms, she’s sitting cross legged. It felt good her body soft and squishy. Arms enclosing me, layers of flesh covering me like blankets. No matter where I would lay my head, it felt like a soft breast. Recall, warmth, nurture, a spoon between my legs, arms enclosing, warmth, my glow in the dark plastic sword pressed on my clit, rubbing, raw. Recall…

Infinitely regressing, my undeveloped neurons do not fire to the external stimulus. I don’t feel the warmth, I do not feel. Recall, I am aware of my physical body, tiny floating in her sac. Aware but cannot feel, no decisions about living, just hanging there.

I wait for the split in my consciousness. The zygote regressing to an egg and a sperm, to an “n” and an “n”. My consciousness splitting into an “n” and an “n”. My consciousness remains intact, perception, sensation and awareness of the physical do not exist. My consciousness does, remains, as is. No more infinite regression. No more regression, no more progression. Just my consciousness. Recall, infinite chronic feelings of emptiness.