I have not always been kind to it.
That is the plain truth of the relationship, the accounting of fifty-something years of a woman and her body that is not the accounting she would have chosen to give at thirty but is the one she can give honestly now, from this distance, with the perspective that only comes from having been in the body a long time and having a record of how the being-in-it went. Not always kind. Often demanding. Frequently treating the body’s needs as inconveniences rather than information, its requests as things to be managed around the schedule rather than the schedule as something to be built around the needs.
I stood in front of the mirror last week without flinching.
Not without noticing. I noticed everything. The way the body has redistributed itself over the years, the things that are different from the body at thirty and the things that are surprisingly unchanged, the new landscape of a body that has been somewhere and shows it. I noticed all of it and I did not flinch. I stood in the morning light, which is the light that tells the truth and does not soften anything, and I looked at this body that has carried me through everything, that has held the grief and the exhaustion and the burning and has kept going, that has been braced for years and is slowly learning to unbrace, and I said, not out loud but in the place where the real conversations happen: thank you.
Thank you for continuing when I did not give you adequate reason to.
Thank you for keeping the record when I could not look at it. Thank you for the shoulders that are a little lower now, for the jaw that is looser in the mornings, for the walk that has become a daily conversation rather than a commute. Thank you for knowing what rest was even when I would not give it to you and for still knowing it when I finally did, for being willing to receive it after years of being refused it, for not holding the refusal against me.
We are on better terms now, this body and I.
It still has its opinions about stairs. I am learning to find that funny rather than alarming. We are learning each other again, in this new season, at this slower pace, in this morning light that tells the truth and that I am finally, mostly, ready to hear.
