“If I were to make a list of things I have trouble believing, I would start with this:
There are people who will love me regardless of my size. And I know, I know it’s silly, but this body has been a burden for so long that it’s hard to see it as anything but dead weight. But how can that be? This thing that carries me, this sacred vessel of life, how can my softness still be a sin? What if this was the body that laughed on mountain tops and got orange peel stuck under its fingernails and slept with the stars and sang children to sleep and what if that love could hold cities together? Hold heartbeats? Hold me? What if I let it?
What if my joints still crack a symphony but I start to learn the tune? I have been so faithful in my unfaithfulness to compassion directed inward, twisted the needles off my compass and tried to sew my parts together the ‘right way’ this time.
Always smaller. Never more, more of me, more hand to reach with more arm to hold with more skin to memorize what sun feels like in autumn. More of me to love with. And what if I carried more life? What if my heartbeat reached farther through veins, echoed louder in a chest more sturdy than slim? Would it be harder to hear why I shouldn’t?
Would it somehow, finally, after twenty-one years of holding my breath
be easier
to breathe?”
