Becoming (My Body)

My journey to become more embodied and trust my body is a tricky one. This is a love letter of sorts to an abandoned body.

Where did you go? 

I think I left you on that train track out behind Waterstreets restaurant in Marietta, the one with the red caboose fully intact, trucking along on smooth rails. You were one of hundreds of dimes I gleefully ran with, jangling in my tiny pockets, to the edge of the tracks and placed on the pock-marked metal, then skipped back with nearly illogical eight-year old amazement (wonder as endless as a fishbowl filled with plastic castles and a forest of manufactured trees to a goldfish) as the old trains careened over you, rendering you a smooth, faceless patina with one moment of extreme acceleration. I’d take you home as a souvenir, yet another oval of undefined copper stacked on my dusty white shelves. 

I think I left you on a mountaintop alongside Japhy Rider as he declared one could not fall down a mountain and proceeded to run, like a mountain goat, jumping from ledge to ledge towards enlightenment. He said it couldn’t be done. Maybe I tried to fall UP a mountain (my natural inclination to do everything backwards and work twice as hard). Japhy was my initial reason for my intended sojourn to Seattle 12 years ago, an upside down adventure that ended up being an extended vacation I could not retract. Through the endless months of rain every year and every atom quaking to awaken through every muscle pain, neurotransmitter misfire, and ounce of lithium in my blood, you could still be there, hiding behind a rock, along with my tattered journals written in the pen of Jack Kerouac, with wild unkempt strains of streams of consciousness, that I buried long ago with the ego of becoming a career copywriter. I stuffed you down along with the words and tonal stylings of a madman that made me feel shame and a trembling fear of my potential power to soar (or derail) and never return to reality. I forgot that you, body, could literally create poetry in your sleep, words snapping from your fingertips like lightning cracking across the darkened basin of a quiet valley, waiting just long enough for me in the waking world so I could snap to and capture the dream poetry before the words swirled away from me into the morning ether. 

I think I left you, a cracked ancient compass, on a sand dune, wind whipping around you, blowing antediluvian gypsum across your glass, clouding and covering you until no one could identify or remember you for what you were. You became a relic, sinking down through the layers of sand and sediment as children delightedly sledded over you in glistening plastic bowls and adults rekindled their youth by leaping down and rolling over you until they hit the hard, cold crusted bottom, falling on stubbly brush and cold, rain-hardened crystals, remembering the reality of aging muscles, bones, and bruised skin. 

I think I left you under a sky I couldn’t take my eyes off of and under the susurration of willow trees I couldn’t bear to stop listening to. I left you under a pile of screens and numbing agents and digital everything and an internal hatred for everything that made me feel something, and forgot the glowing, frenetic magic of energy pulsing through my veins, every atom, a white dazzling glow of a snow globe smattering of dust motes dancing in a room in a shaft of light at early dawn. Dazzling before me, dazzling behind -- the only thing that is real in any moment unencumbered by thought.