Something Soft, Like My Body

by Madeline Vosch

2023 Essay Contest Honorable Mention

I should begin with something, by way of introduction. Something to start building the structure. Something to scaffold. A way of easing in, an image of contrast, to be held up against what comes next. Maybe a river that could mean change, acceptance, or the ability to adapt. A tree, to stand in for steadfastness, rootedness. A field of soy and corn, like the one that surrounded the town I grew up in, which I never settled on a metaphor for. Maybe there are too many. 

Or I could begin with a memory, my mother pulling me through town on a bright red wagon after she had a seizure and couldn’t drive for a few months. Or I could begin by invoking a character from literature, a figure from classical mythology. Artemis, maybe, hunting a stag. 

Instead, let me begin where I will end, with something soft, like my body. My body which is, in many ways, like yours. A heart that beats faster when I’m nervous. Skin that sweats when I’m in the sun. A thing that needs water, needs food. My body which is unlike yours in as many ways as yours is unlike mine. I have strabismus, my eyes don’t line up. I have a faint mustache above my upper lip, which I remove every sixty days. Though I am right-handed, my left leg is stronger than my right. Every month I get very tired and don’t understand why, and then my period comes and I remember. 

Is this enough to begin? Is there a central idea, to which I can return, to weave these disparate pieces together? Please don’t sneer, I am not postmodern, I just don’t know how to start.

One morning I went to the bathroom and didn’t know where the blood was coming from. The toilet paper was splotched pink and I was sore all over. I stared at the paper and thought maybe the blood was coming out of every hole. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe the bruise on my neck. 

I had only had a hickey once before in my life, when I was a freshman in college. I was too old for this now, to be bathing my skin in cover-up, trying on scarves, testing how well my hair could hide this discoloration. 

I was careful at work. Hair twined in my fingers, to keep it covering the right place on my neck. Checking in my phone camera when no one else was in the room, examining in the bathroom mirror, reapplying the thick pale paste. I was thankful for my mask, which hid every wince. I gave myself extra time to go to the bathroom because it hurt to walk and took longer to get there. The steps stung. I made sure to go when no one else would be there, when there would not be another person in the next stall who would hear the sharp intake of breath as I sat. The air through gritted teeth as I peed. The hours trickled around me, refusing to speed up. I watched how people looked at me. Did they see anything? Could they tell? Would they say anything if they did? 

The night before, I’d told the boy to be careful. I’d told him he can’t, told him not to, said it again. He did it anyway.

I shuffled through the day. It hurt to sit, it hurt to walk. The boy texted, invited me to some kind of concert. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, I thought. If it had been so bad he wouldn’t have invited me anywhere. This was normal, I thought, this was fine.

I didn’t tell anyone about the blood, or how gentle I had to be with toilet paper that day; there was nothing, really, to tell. 

If I had started with the image of a river, here is where I would come back to it. I would tell you about a summer night, when I stripped off all my clothes except my underwear, a small string that only covered the front of me, and jumped into the Willamette River. I would tell you how the polluted waters felt clean, and I felt young. Maybe I would tell you something about water and cleansing, maybe something about a fountain of youth. I was one among many, surrounded by friends, some waiting on the dock, some kicking in the water next to me. I might tell you how some of my friends were totally naked, and how I didn’t understand why I didn’t want to take off my underwear, since it was so small anyway. But I wanted it where it was. There was some part of me that I wanted to keep hidden, for myself. My boyfriend was there, clothed, on the dock. My boyfriend and myself and the dirty water, the only things I wanted to see this part of me. It was the only time I swam in the Willamette, the only time I ever touched the shore. If I had started with this image of the river, I might tell you how porous the boundaries became, my body, the water, my friends, their arms, the dock. The lap of the tide in steady rhythm. I might even tell you all of the story, that it was the Fourth of July and fireworks were screaming over our heads. 

I have a brown mole on the very center of my abdomen, exactly between my breasts and belly button. I didn’t want to write that, but now it is too late. When I go swimming, everyone sees it anyway. 

I met him in a bar. I’d been having a bad day and wanted to cancel the date but told myself it was better to be out of the house. He’d suggested we meet somewhere downtown. I hated going downtown but thought I shouldn’t be so cynical. The bar was full of people my age who looked like they belonged in a catalog, or an Instagram ad. I pretended to be comfortable. 

For our second round of drinks, I told him to surprise me. I was proving to myself that I could flirt. When we stood up I could see that he was a little shorter than me. He invited me to his apartment, which was in the very same building as the bar. We just had to ride up a few floors in an elevator. What a happy coincidence. 

(Do you see how many ways this was my fault?) 

If I’d started with a tree, here is where I would return to it. I would tell you about the tree in my backyard, and the tire swing we tied to one of the branches when I was a child. There was a hollow in the trunk of the tree, as if the inside had been scooped out. The hollow space reached up from the ground all the way above the branch that held the tire swing. A secret tunnel that we could crawl into, climb up, and sit atop. 

My parents said we would have to cut it down some day. It was dangerous, since so much of it was missing. It was liable to fall over in a storm. Here I might say something about how much we delighted in this lopsided tree as children. How magical it seemed. How perfect, the hollow entrance, like the opening of a tent. How natural, for it to lead right to the branch. I might tell you that what we loved about it was exactly what made it vulnerable. Marked for demolition. 

I don’t want you to think of a Lacanian notion of desire and lack, or to think that I am making some comparison between the hollow of this tree and the space in my body. So I will not tell you any more about this tree. 

I was on his bed. He had left the door to his balcony open. The wall was almost entirely windows. I stared out at the lights of the high-rises, felt the night breeze against my eyeballs. His hand was at my throat, pressing. He didn’t ask, wasn’t doing it the way you are supposed to—against the sides, to not cut off the windpipe. His hand was heavy, hard, pushing all of me down, separating my body from the air around me. I tapped on the back of his hand. “Too much,” I whispered. I didn’t look at his face as he let go. 

He flipped me over on my belly. It was fine until it wasn’t. Until I didn’t know which body parts were where. There was pressure, pain, in places I’d told him not to touch. There is no nice or pretty way to describe this for you. There were things in places I did not want. Fingers, cock, pushing. I’d told him before that I didn’t want to do the thing that he was doing. It was happening anyway. In the neon-shaded darkness of his tech-salary apartment, I forgot if my eyes were open or closed. On display, naked and defenseless in front of him, in front of the whole city, in front of the night sky. Is this sexual assault? I wondered. 

I imagined a woman I had met in group therapy standing by the bed, looking down at me, disappointed. She would never let something like this happen to her, I thought.

He turned me on my back and I wasn’t sure where to look. Again, his hand at my throat. There were things to breathe in all around me, but his hand was against me, cutting off my body from the rest of the world. 

His voice in my ear. “This body,” he said. “This body.” I wanted to ask him whose, but I was afraid I already knew the answer. 

The next day, the Wordle was “choke.” I stared at the letters. I wish I was kidding. 

Here is where I would really, totally and fully, return to the image I began with. To make a complete circle, to weave the threads of this essay together. To give you, dear reader, a moment to inhale. 

If I started with the fields, I would begin by repeating the same sentence: A field of soy and corn, like the one that surrounded the town I grew up in, which I never settled on a metaphor for. The fields were both full and empty at once. Thick with stalks, with nothing behind them but more fields. I would tell you about how sometimes, I would go walking along the gravel roads and there were fields and rolling hills in all directions. I was so small, so insignificant. I spent so many days there, walking the paths, sweating in the Midwest sun. I might tell you something about eternity, or Denis Johnson, the long, straight roads. I might try to describe how the days stretched, how trapped a person can feel in the center of all that openness. 

But I didn’t start with any of those things, majestic, large, full of meaning. I started with my body. My body, which is so very much like yours. Full of holes and equipped with fingernails. My body, which is so unlike yours. Freezing when yours might fight. My body, like your body, which is not a metaphor for anything. 

Once, in college, after I’d told someone no but not loudly enough, not forcefully enough, not insistently enough, I sent them an email, said I hadn’t wanted that to happen. I was uncomfortable. 

When they wrote back, they asked if they could use my email in a poem they were writing. My body, my words, made public. My body, my words, raw material for someone else. Please don’t, I said. I didn’t understand why my permission was important then when it hadn’t been before. 

It was a hickey, I told myself, again and again. It was a hickey. It was just a hickey. When I tried to remember a moment that he stayed too long, kissing, his lips at my neck, all I could feel was his hand at my throat.

At a protest for abortion rights in Austin, I saw in the distance a man I had slept with months before. It would be more narratively convenient if this was the same person who had pressed his palm against my windpipe, but it was someone else. 

For weeks after I stopped seeing this person, I woke up and checked my underwear. I was late. The next day, I checked again. I was still late. I didn’t know how many days should pass before I took a test, before I had to do something. 

It was lopsided, uneven: it got to be over for him, while I woke up and looked at my dry underwear and had to start drafting messages. It wasn’t his fault, this imbalance. It’s just that my body carried the consequences. 

I looked at the prices for flights out of state, in case it was already too late to get an abortion in Texas. I bought a pregnancy test. It was negative, and my period came three days after, like Jesus. 

Some people, like Plato and St. Augustine, think that a soul is separate from a body. The body is flesh which is somehow distinct from spirit. It becomes a process of dividing. A person is actually made of two things. There are bad things (fleshy) and good things (spirit). A lot of distinctions and categories. Mind over matter. 

It’s nice, sometimes, to think that the body is not all there is. That there is some other, secret self that might slip out when the body rots.

When I lay face down on his bed, my body felt far away, but my body was all I was. “This body,” he said. This body.

At the protest for abortion rights, I walked through the streets and choked on the words I said over and over. My body, my choice. My breath in my throat. My body, my choice. The distinctions started to break down. My voice caught. My body, my choice. I began to cry.

Here is where I can’t end with water or trees or a field that goes on forever. There is no metaphor. Just a body, just my body. Small and vulnerable, like yours. 

Small, and vulnerable, and mine.

Published February 19th, 2023