A Body

I wish for a body that was mine.

One that carried and danced and functioned with the efficiency of centuries of evolution. 

I want to walk with passion, pink petals under my sneakers, bubbling with the livelihood of youth; I want to walk without the tug of lead wire splintering my bones, without the grating of joints and tearing of cartilage. 

I want to be free, to inhale a breath of crisp apple air and my lungs to flutter and take flight like an ivory dove. I want to breathe without the ache of crushed ribs, the shudder and burn of the cage containing my heart. A shift in my torso sears my shoulder blades with the scalpel slice of muscles pulled too tight and a spine that can’t help but bend under phantom manacles. 

When I stand it’s awkward. Bent limbs and sharp edges. Breaking takes time, and the time for fluid movement has been replaced by bowstring fingers and locked wrists. Like invisible ivy braiding around my tendons, my nails now dig into calloused palms. Dexterous digits of an artist reduced to quivering liabilities. 

I feel old, like a brittle birch unable to face another day under the sneering sun. It’s illogical, like a frozen clock that never moves despite new batteries and fresh factory cogs. I run to keep up with my peers who are simply walking, backs straight and rhythmic gait, ripples of yellow and purple hues cascading from energetic footsteps and the glow of weightless smiles. 

There is pain where there should be performance and standards too high for someone with broken legs to reach. I can see myself up above from where I now stand, a child with fair, unblemished skin and a field of breezy lavender and chamomile in their smirk. The child looks down on me now, chesnut eyes swimming with the same look I see when I step through my front door. The door to a house that will never be a home. 

Mother looks at me now with a look I know she gives herself in the mirror each morning, seeing the blinding sight of a breaking body, a cage with no bars or windows, and simply no need for a door. An exit. The child she gave birth to, the boy made of glass is now a crushed butterfly wing, unable to fly and left to fall into the suffocating void of navy and pavement gray. 

When my eyes flicker, when I count two fingers instead of one, I can’t help but close them behind the ever thickening squares of glass and plastic I’ve perched upon my nose since I wore striped sweaters and two pairs of socks to scare off the metallic cold of a classroom filled with tiny, banana yellow chairs. The classroom may change, now there's more than one I stumble to with popping knees and heavy steps, but the whiteboard up front is the same fuzzy, sparkling blur. The world surrounds me like stagnant tv static, ticklish blues, greens, and pinks pricking my corneas and prodding my brain with a wicked sense of amusement. Streetlights are like oversaturated cotton balls, combed wool stretched taut between metal fibers. Without the twice yearly visit to an office and a glaring leather chair, faces look like dotted canvas of peach and beige, tinted blue in a malformed pupil. 

A body is a tool, a prop, a costume. A means of crossing one street to another, a breathing cosplay of who I want to be, a sign written in whatever color I choose to heed the warning or give welcome. Mine is a cage, a crumbling building with burned and blackened walls and a forgotten, moldy basement underneath. It's a refuge to the homeless and disheartened but the property owner has long abandoned it. It will never be mine. 

Where it should function, it fails, wooden beams collapsing under the featherlight weight, roof panels rotting in the foul humidity. 

Where it should stand tall and proud, with sturdy angles and impeccable paint, something manages to be wrong, wrong shape, wrong size, wrong design, wrong model. A work in progress that never finishes. 

It goes on and on, just like my sore fingers clicking louder than my vinyl keyboard, surrounded by darkness on a cushion of plastic wrapped in linen, the gentle hum of cars passing and midnight goers shouts pirouetting through an open window. But my head has begun to hurt, glasses doing little to correct my exhausted eyes, and a throbbing in my joints that has grown too comfortable under my skin to find another home. It goes on and on. 

I wish I had a body that was mine.