Dress Sizes

I don’t want to write about you, and how I don’t feel right inside when the gap between us is so wide or when we spar, everything inside of me wells up and there is no fresh air getting through – I don’t wear anger well, or the time you are away. I dislike how I feel primitive with my expressions.  Your vanilla and I am not, you rationalize, and I cannot.  You accept and I fight.  You’re inside the lines and I like it when I cross against the lights.   But when you wrap your arms, around me, there is only passion, and it swallows me completely and in that moment, I re-bloom.  With passion comes conflict and it’s not easy.  I think you prefer cerebral conflicts to the heat of a passionate heart.

My body, it’s all around me, and I can’t get away from it.  I liked it better when I walked past the mirror and averted my eyes, slipped on my jeans without noticing my thighs, or the excess tipping over the top.  Oh how I long for the days of indifference, before I was aware of my body.  To the gym, I go each morning, four out of the seven days, I do, I do.  The muscle came, as did the added pounds that I am told is OK because it’s lean muscle mass and not fat.  This is good, but that knowledge does nothing for me because the mind and scale cannot resolve their hostile differences.    Some of the fat stayed, while some calcified, and the body toned.    I ask myself in the dead of the night when my hand travels across the curves, is this good enough?  Barely audible, a hushed whisper, and I hear what my mind tells my body.    Now I train with a drill sergeant and eat tofu and berries.

Writing, I don’t want to write about this either because it’s making me crazy.   I am easily discouraged in my pursuit of this dream to be a writer.  I tell myself that I am a writer because I write and write, all the time, here, there, everywhere, at work, on the train, on my bed, in my head, I write.   I am a writer.  But why then don’t I feel like a writer, I ask my all-knowing conscious?  To which he replies, “Because you’ve been taught to be a writer, you must be published, have a blog or three, a following, a platform, have won contests, and are loved by adorning fans who send you green and blue knitted afghans, leave comments on your blogs (all three, even the one that you write under an alias) and send you concert tickets and stalk you in parking lots.”    Of course, I reply.  I don’t have stalkers, but oh, how I want at least two.  Contests I’ve won, but not the gold, only the honorable mention.  Posts I make, writing I do.  What shall I do about the madness I howl?  He shakes his head and invites me in for a drink.

Later, I stagger out of his lair less crazed than when I entered, but drunk and dazed.  He reminded me that passions like writing and lovers that you don’t want to think about are sheer torture.  He feels my pain (daily he reminds) but tells me not to give up so easily on myself.  He chides me and suggests I go back and re-read the first love letter to the lanky one that plagues me as much as my writing does, and to look in my closet and to take note that I no longer wear a size twenty-four.