After all this thinking about the frozen image, I came across something I had written a few years ago (here mangled a bit), back when I used to do some modeling for figure and portrait drawing at the local art museum.
After class, one of the women sidles on up to me while I’m filling out my modeling slip. She asks me my name. I tell her. Then she takes both of my hands in hers, rubbing her thumbs on the backs of my knuckles, and looks deeply in to my eyes. She says, “Lilah, you are so beautiful. You would be so much happier if you lost fifty pounds.”
I resist jerking my hands from hers. After a moment, I tell her thank you. I tell her that I am really very happy, I tell her that I like my body just fine. She asks me with great pity, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Before I can answer, her lips are taut and she is shaking her head from side to side in anticipation. She thinks she knows what I’m going to say.
“I do, actually,” I answer, which is a little less complicated than the truth, but that point was moot in the moment. I make my exit then, tearing away from her and out of the building. I sit in my car in silence, watching my breath curl in the cold, imagining the small congratulatory pats she gave herself as she watched me running in the opposite direction. Why had I lied?
Is that all there is to happiness? A boyfriend? So far it hasn’t worked for me, but maybe that’s because I’m fat and can only scrape the bottom of the barrel. I wonder how many people I repulse on any given day as I walk around clueless, believing that I am not a monster. And all that time, I am making others cringe with this failed potential I waste at beauty. I wonder how many more men I could attract if I were 102 pounds, as she suggested, instead of all 152 pounds I actually am. I wonder if the people that I do sleep with would find me more desirable if I were thin. Would they love me more? Would they fuck me harder? Could they keep their hands off of me? Would they treat me kinder, touch me with more tenderness? Would they stay longer?
Who’s truth is more valuable, mine or theirs? How much is my own self perception worth? I still think I am beautiful; is that a lie I have told myself so I do not buckle in the face of my own ugliness?
I remember lying on my back in the kitchen. My then-boyfriend (by the way darling, you’re mid-barrel at least) was leaning a carved hip against the stove, looking down at me. He seemed confused by how deeply and easily she had uprooted me and frustrated that he didn’t have the words to make it just dissolve. Was there anybody in my life anymore who could remember me younger, less sure, ashamed of everything I touched? I didn’t know how to explain myself. I felt like I had lived constantly at war with the eyes of others. How do you sum these sorts of ghosts up?
The other day I overheard two women talking in a dressing room. I watched myself in the mirror while I listened to the sounds of hands slapping and pulling at flesh, tongues ticking with disappointment, all this breathlessness, hopelessness. I was glad for the body I had, if only because once I had been so consumed by it that now it bored me. I thought about the woman at the art museum, how she might lave been the last battle in my war of attrition. When I gathered myself again, I no longer much cared. I stopped struggling. I could will myself into a seahorse with better luck.
Survival is the way your brain bends around the world to shield your most vulnerable parts. It certainly is something to look on at a person at war, knowing how all they’re fighting for is only a small moment of peace. Maybe it’s hardest for the ones who can actually envision what victory looks like for them, who can see a finish line. I never could. I threw up the white flag. I don’t miss whatever it was that I lost.
