Ribs
Let us laugh, ugly laughter, from the pits of our bellies, from the bottom of our soles, pushing into the veins of our eyelids. The same bodies that we rued since the day we met them––let us meet them once more. Greet them with kindness and refuse the estrangement that creeps into the periphery. Let us be still again, lucid. We shall no longer think of ourselves as floating heads, seeping vulvas, hard breasts, black gums, crooked, and harsh teeth. We will no longer have the desire to compare our round and dark selves to the moon or to the sun or to the stars. We shall drink from the final and sweet waters.
Let us mend ourselves, weft by weft, refusing the distance between Ourselves and the Other. Tenderness and softness, subjugation and servitude, beauty and frailty; these things are not needed where we are going.
9
A gaggle of self-important nine year olds stuck in the confines of Gifted English went through their weekly list of vocabulary. In the sticky Georgia heat, they listed off words and their definitions, one by one, the syllables bumping against each other across uneven teeth. The lazy recitation waned into the white clock face, waiting until the sweet, sweet hour of freedom. 3:30. Thirty more minutes until the words were soon, and rightfully, forgotten. The air was alight with the giddy, yellow excitement of these final school weeks. The memory of the school year was already faint, fleeting.
As testament to my selective memory and emotional hoarding, I do not remember a single word from that list except for one. Zaftig. It’s a word of Yiddish origin, meaning “a woman who is full-figured.” Or more specifically, as my jaded fourth-grade English teacher phrased it, “pleasantly plump.” Zaftig. Pleasantly plump. It makes sense that I would hold onto such a word, even after the steady passage of time and maturity. As I sat in that classroom, buried in my threadbare, oversized, maroon sweatshirt shaped to hide the nascent form of a fat kid’s prepubescent and uncertain body, I imagined the kind of woman who would call herself zaftig. She would be a happy woman, probably a good and prolific cook (a skill which would serve to make sense of her large existence.) She would have many round and plump babies who would eventually run their way into an athleticism, distance themselves from maternal fatness, but never let their own memories erase the tenderness of her embrace. Zaftig. I imagined her as viscerally entwined with her own culture, chosen as a cornerstone of communal abundance, the only symbolic element of fat womanhood that dripped with nobility, purpose.
I was, of course, not this woman. I sported maroon, high fantasy-chic, thin-rail glasses to match the lumpy sweater. The weekly cycle of jeans began and ended with a scratchy pair of bootcut, black pants that I rolled into an unassuming, and deeply unflattering capri. I wore converse that I intentionally scuffed and dirtied on the pavement because they never looked cool when they were pristine and new. I made myself feel sufficient in my clothing. Was it pretty? No. But it did not have to be. I was a smart kid. I couldn’t do math, but I could read, I could feel. Novels made me cry and my friends made me laugh and my teachers always seemed to like me enough. I was sufficient.
I did not realize the apologies that I stuffed into the folds of my sweater. The tender and shameful sorries that I hid under layers of cotton and polyester. The embarrassment when anyone would look too long at my frame. How dare I force them to see the ways I shove myself in the tube of my own skin, a fat sausage girl with buck teeth and round fingers. With each tug at the bottom of my shirt to make sure no one saw the dip of my belly, with each long sleeve that covered the tapestry of new stretch marks, I whispered sorry. Sorry you have to experience me Sorry you have to see me Sorry.
I carried these apologies in my hands, in my face, in my voice for years. I channeled the unfortunate circumstance of my heaviness into my attitude. Pleasantly plump. Pleasant. Smile comfortingly when they look at you so they know where to cut first. Speak clearly, confidently, smartly. I learned quickly to laugh with other women and girls when talked about their community-organized starving sessions, speaking of their own bodies as inconveniences. I learned to talk about the fat on my bones like a glue-like phlegm that “just wouldn’t budge.” I did not know how else to speak of myself. The woman in my memory, zaftig, was a caricature. She was not real, nor would she understand the ways I dreamt of pulling my stomach and cutting into it deeply, cutting it away from myself.
18
I remember the first time I laid against a partner; the room dark to hide the rolling plain of our bodies. He dipped his fingertips in the curve of the space where my thigh met my hip. “I like this,” he whispered. This meaning how it all melted into each other, this meaning the places on my body where hands and lips could find purchase. My heart hitched in my throat. As we drifted to sleep, the phantom pressure of his hand pressed deep into my skin, I planned how I would leave his house as soon as dawn struck.
I would, of course, call him again. Open myself again. Being desired is an addictive and ugly thing. But to be treated tenderly, with hands that know the weight of your thighs, eyes that do not look away when you wear your love for them so openly across the roundness of your face. To know that, to feel that, is to feel the realness of your heart, the warmth of your very living body. I hate that men can give this to me, even when they are unworthy, even when they are cruel. I hate that I cannot give this to myself.
19
I’ve caught myself as a woman obsessed. Obsessed with the running of my fingers across the jagged lines spread flat against my belly. My ribs can only be felt when you gently, persistently, press into the soft, malleable skin, the brownness of several generations pooling at the bottom of my spine. Seeping with the rich history of this body. I feel the metal of the button on my old jeans bite deeply into the fat above my belly button. Stare at the denim stitching stretch against the expanse of my legs. This body is unrepentant, straining, aware.
We eat these reflective parts of ourselves. The cold seeping and puncturing our lungs; we delve deep into the pain of being wanted. Loved as they told us to be loved. But if we release, refuse the bite and the cut of the knife, who are we? What are we then but the gnawing husk of our mother’s, our grandmother’s failures?
We know that, inevitably, we will fail. We will bargain our happiness and our lives on the whims of men who will never, not ever, love us. We will eat at the tables we set despite our tears blinding us, thickened with maize flour and salt. We will raise children, girl children, who we will integrate into the cult of self-immolation. And as she burns, falls into the rot and dysfunction and isolation of womanhood, we ask ourselves again and again.
When did we begin to want the things we do? Who gave us this knowledge, seal broken and soft insides scooped out, consumed? We bleed, hot and red, across the pavement.
How cruel it is to sell this to us as freedom, as liberation. How cruel it is to see our bent forms, emaciated chest cavities gaping open, and dig into us with that horrific avarice. How cruel it is to refuse threading of the needle, the suturing of the wound.
When did we begin want this? When did we begin want this at all?
20
I struggle to believe that this belongs to me. I drink most nights and wish I were free. Lipstick on the back of my hand running bloody like an open sore. I am beautiful when I say no.
22
We are stunted and painfully awkward. I try to hide the relief when you reach for the light switch, flooding the room with a comfortable blackness. And perhaps it is the headiness of mint liquor from the punk show, or the beat of Kreuzberg, but in the soft recess of your small corner room, in the furrows of a gray and blue apartment complex, I swear that you're the most beautiful person I have ever seen.
My eyes adjust to the darkness, and the glow of the streets below illuminate the curvature of skin. You've put yellow marigolds in a tin can and placed them by the window. We are dense with wanting.
Chromatic and warm lights behind the eyes. It matters very little what I do when I am pressed against you like this. And when you rest the rough-hewn hands of a person who works too often against my frame, when you breathe heavy and vulnerable, I am alight. Is it because you are, if only for a moment, weak? This is why women have lived like this for generations––waiting for the brief and tender second when she loves with her throat exposed, mouth agape and ready for gutting.
It's over as quickly as we come down, the fresh magic dissolved into the heat of the night. It should feel shameful, but the sheen of sweat reminds me to stretch into my skin a bit more. There should be that eternal burden of the girl, the bleeding of a lived-in body. But it is not there; instead, we share the most gentle laughter that we have had in months. I am embracing the unknown hollow of this feeling, and remind myself that we both hold this.
A consciousness lazily but persistently rounding the edged glass of a death, a release––recuperating in the spaces where we are no longer categorical, no longer fragmented. Where the necessary condition for our justification is not the deftness of our performance. Body neutralized into the heat of a natural and bearable light.
•
The streetlight streaks white-yellow into the room. I can smell the hot oil of the french fries in the Döner shop across the way. I count the number of times your leg grazes mine as you fall into welcomed sleep. I relearn the art of holding. The various ways of grasping something that is not my own. Lightly so as to not possess, but steadily so as to heal, to understand.
I know it is not freedom that I see when you look at me, but for once, I am laid flat against a semblance of humanity. I am not sucked in, pressed back, holding pose, holding gut, stretching out neck, and wondering if it is enough. I am not outside of my body, pinching and pressing and figuring out the ways I can make you want to look at me. You want to look at me. And I want to look at you. In this way we witness each other. I am lucid, waiting, awake. I understand the weight of each breath I take.
In a few hours, we drink coffee and try not to smile at each other in that coy way that asks for more information, more knowledge of the other. You ask if I need directions to the train, and I say I do not, but thank you. Your eyes no longer contain that once-familiar alacrity, and the silence is still with the thoughts of the night previous. We are no longer disjointed by the alcohol, almost too aware of one another to find comfort. And yet, I find myself hesitating to leave. The thought of it runs over and over in my mind, crackled 35mm film of heat and tongue and laughter, as I board the train to Alexanderplatz. As I step from the train and onto the platform, up the gum-and-paper splattered steps into the solid and sure pulse of the morning, I am aware of how I trust myself.
A body is a strange and wrought place to feel like an imposter, but I slowly unfurl, and allow myself to sink into the sureness of my existence.
Milka Kiriaku is a queer black writer, educator, and emulsion extraordinaire. Ever the personal welfare-idealogue, they rely religiously on strong community, great books, terrible movies, and hylauronic acid.