This is not a metaphor.
I mean the shoulders.
The actual shoulders.
The ones that rose sometime in late March
and did not come back down
until the email arrived
and even then not all the way,
not fully,
because the email said planning to
and planning to is not the same as yes
and the body knows the difference
even when the mind decides to be grateful.
I have spent twenty-five years
with elevated shoulders.
I did not notice for a long time.
That is also what precarity does.
It becomes the baseline.
The tension becomes the normal.
You forget there is another way to carry yourself
because you have not carried yourself any other way
in longer than you can remember.
Someone touched my shoulder once,
a friend,
just a hand resting there,
and said: you are so tight.
I said: I know.
I did not say: I have been waiting
for a decision about my employment
every year for twenty-five years
and the body keeps the record
of every year of waiting.
I said: I know.
I tried to let it go.
The shoulders came down a little.
They came back up by April.
I am learning, now,
to notice the rising.
To put a hand on my own shoulder
and say: it is all right.
The waiting is almost over.
Not because the contract is secured,
but because I am no longer
organizing my body around their decision.
That is a different kind of settling.
The kind that comes from inside.
El cuerpo recuerda lo que la mente aprendió a ignorar.
The body remembers what the mind learned to ignore.
