Dear Body December
2020
Dear body,
Even though I cannot hold you and rock you yet, I know you’re there. I’ve always felt your presence. First as a longing I wanted to embrace. Then as a longing I wanted to kill. Then as a sadness, red and long that I wasn’t ready for, so I met you in depression. Then I met you in resistance, my own stubbornness refusing you.
But now you’re telling me you have longings too. You long to be nourished. You long for nourishment.
I’m listening now. Listening to your warmth and invitations, your softness and light. I see your caverns and waters, and I feel you like a sword, relaxed and strong.
I hear you sing when I take a sip of bone broth, feel you wake up when I put a dash of Lion’s Mane in my coffee each afternoon, remember the freedom of who you once were screaming and wailing out of the fire. We need to fan those fires now. Out of the flames, we are coming closer to each other, dancing the close of this season, trusting for the first time, transforming so that one day farther down the road, I will be ready to rock you and hold you.
Until we meet again,
Kelsay
Dear Body December Day 2
I got lost in the act of looking, the act of seeing myself reflected back.
Even in my 20s, I had a reputation amongst my friends for staring at the myself in the mirror. At a dim sum night with four other people, I was the last to sit down, which happened to place me on the side facing the mirrors on the wall, and I spent the entire dinner talking to them while quite obviously looking at my own reflection in the mirror behind their heads.
Of course, I had many theories about object relations, the lack of mirroring in my childhood, a quest for love and struggle for knowledge about my own existence, and a need to make manifest the encounter with my dialogical self in my 20s and early 30s. To tell the truth, I still believe in all of these theories, some of them quite fiercely.
Tonight, I again had to climb furniture in order to see into the mirrors in my parent’s home. I still don’t have the answers to what I see, or what I’m looking for either. I find a certain comfort in that now. In the seeing without knowing precisely what is there.
Dear Body December Day 5
Make-up has been challenging for me since I was in middle school. My mom wears make-up, but she was more comfortable teaching me about Emerson and Thorough, Carl Sandburg and Fabian socialism.
She didn’t know how to put make-up on Asian faces, so she took me to the make-up counters in the mall to have the “pros” teach me, but they were all white too. They didn’t know how to accentuate my eyes which fold in ways that are different from how they were taught, and they always gave me foundation that was too dark for my actual skin tone, so I ended up looking odd with an orange layer of skin around my jawline.
I never actually learned how to put on make-up that would flatter my face, so I still just wear foundation (that actually matches my skin tone), and if I feel like it some days I’ll wear lipstick and even fewer days run an eyeliner and some light shadow around my eyes, guessing and running out of patience with each line.
Dear Body December Days 6-8
Everything is red again, and yet, I’m finding it difficult to hold onto beauty these days as I watch my whole body burn red, my skin turning into welts, hives, bumps and lesions. It feels like a betrayal; this wretched redness that itches and crawls across my body: my forehead and eyelids, my neck, chest and breasts, my stomach, my pelvis, my arms, underarms and hands which are burning, burning through my thoughts of California like a wildfire straight down to my thighs, knees, legs and feet. A slow body burn from the inside out.
I sit with the words: “I love and accept myself” as I begin to fade out again from all the medications these past three days: 4 Benadryl, 110 grams of Prednisone, a shot of Epinephrine, 5 pills of hydroxyzine, but I love and accept myself.
But can I love and accept the leper staring back at me these days between Prednisone doses? I wonder as I drift off, and the answer is disappointing in its No-ness. I look at my face uncovered by the organic make-up foundation that matches my skin tone, and I decide to post unfiltered pictures of it because I want to love and accept it, even if I’m not quite there yet.
I look at my legs that don’t even look like legs so much as monstrous mumps, and think how no one can love this, just as my cat nestles right down onto them, circling until she’s comfortable and then laying down on top of all the monstrosity, and in a instant, my burning turns warm and gooey. I am humbled. I am loved and accepted, and I fall asleep remembering all the things that shimmer in red and gold.
Dear Body December Day 17
The Most Beautiful Filter
Orange blossoms inside my landscape. An orange and yellow scarf fall to the hard-caked dirt, the cracks adding some much needed drama to the desert of my womb while outside snow falls in large flakes that disappear as soon as they touch the ground. It’s winter now, but everything inside of me burns. My sacral life force is awake, and she is on fire. She beckons and enflames my roots, my power, my wisdom in this quiet, patient pulsing. In between each pulse, I glimpse the beckoning. I am ready for this slow burn.
Moon
I was pumping gas one night under the moonlight when a man came up to me. “You’re such a beautiful woman,” he said, and the way he said it was like he was admiring the most beautiful piece of artwork he’d ever seen. “Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I’ve admired art and women that way, too. The gasoline that lingered on my fingertips smelled sweet, and that sweetness is something I want to hold onto. The sweetness of a moment that’s already a memory now. I want somehow to keep it alive within me forever, but I know I can’t. I still feel beautiful when I think of it, but I’m seeing it now through a filter.
An orange filter that enflames my skin, wrapping me in welts, hives and bumps from forehead to toe until I am unrecognizable. My skin now scaly and raised, the skin of a dragon, and my throat parched from the fire inside no amount of water can satiate. Do all women become dragons as we age?
Stinson
I remember watching the fire smoke, hazy through the bay trees and pines in California last September. My skin broken out like it hadn’t in years. I wondered why as I had started washing and moisturizing it almost every day, paying more attention than I used to. Maybe it’s the shea butter they like to put in the all-natural organic products that my skin always reacts to. Less than 1% of the entire population is allergic to shea, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Maybe it’s the stress of the wildfires, the pandemic, the prison-industrial complex, California living. I noticed my face started looking older a month before I turned thirty-six. There are clear wrinkles around my left eye. I used to want a face full of wrinkles, the signs of a hard yet beautiful life. It’s finally starting to happen now, that life and these wrinkles, and I’m using the subtle filter on all of my Stories to cover it up.
Even as I cover my face in generic organic make-up for Zoom meetings and filter all social media postings, I know I cannot conceal the colors of my soul. They rise up between the ash and smoke, two scarves lying there at my feet in the hard dirt and sunshine, reminding me that this is who I am: yellow and orange, a thirty-six year old woman, a dragon, on fire, enflamed, in the summer of her life this winter, burning her way into middle age, beautiful and filtered.
Inkwell
My season is turning. The fire burning inside all of the orange blossoms, as it burns me now. My allergic reaction has disappeared from my skin with the prednisone, but my body continues to burn, cleansing and clearing a path. My green dragon mixing with yellow and becoming orange wings. And when I come into my orange wings, I can emerge fully purged in the summer of middle life.
I’ve taken to wearing scarves this winter as I sit by the fire at my parents’ house awaiting the turn. I brought too many California clothes with me for the Michigan winter temperatures, so I’ve been wearing scarves and cabin socks to keep warm. It reminds me of the styles I see middle-aged women wear. Middle-aged women are the most beautiful. I’ve thought so since I was 12 years old, and I stood in front of Ivan Albright’s Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida at The Art Institute of Chicago. As far as I know, I am the only one who sees beauty when looking at his painting. My friends and parents’ find all the decaying flesh and shadows creepy. Amidst all the realness, I can see the creepiness now too. Life distorted in an instant by an artist overcome by shadows, flesh wrinkles and folds. A woman turned into a dragon. Her skin decayed, bubbling, rising, and still, in between her soul rising, comes the most beautiful filter.
Earlier draft of a poem for my chapbook manuscript “In Between Smoke Rising”
Dear Body December Day 19
I’ve been inspired by the new Anthropologie Wellness Journal and reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones for the Book Year Book Club to try my hand at having a daily writing practice.
This journal has food tracking for the Body section; Emotional, self-reflection sections and space for creative expressions in the Mind section; and blank pages like this to fill as you wish for the Soul section.
I have to keep a food journal for my allergist right now, so I got this one, and it’s been remarkable tracking myself daily and recording it in this journal (that I have Happy Planner sticker collaged up as well)!
I’m recognizing that writing makes me accountable to and for myself, and this journal is showing me my process as it’s happening. I also got my #DearBodyDecember post for today knocked out with my morning writing practice. . .
