Monthly Theme

The first time I cut my skin intentionally was on my sixteenth birthday. That morning, I’d failed my driving test. I shouldn’t have taken the test that day, both because failing made for a shitty birthday and because I didn’t really know how to drive. I didn’t understand, for example, that you should slow down while turning. I was disappointed and embarrassed, so I dragged my shaving razor across my forearm once or twice.

Our bodies twitch and lurch and tingle and pinch and tire and inspire and confuse. For example, on a crisp fall day in 2023, I was sitting in a classroom, an observer, when I felt an itch. Without conscious thought my hand moved to my breast, an instinctual move, a response, an urge, only to touch my hand to my body just in time to remember it was a phantom itch, a glitch of my brain and nerves and memory, the breast, almost three years gone but still ever present. This happens in other contexts, too, where I will reach for my breasts only to find them gone, like when taking a bubble bath and my mind sees them, like ghosts, sagging with gravity towards the lavender scented bath water.

For as long as I can remember, I have been at war with a word. The f-word. No, not that f-word, though I could easily tell a tale about the wins and losses I’ve had with that notorious expletive. The f-word that I’ve been battling, well, it’s been bigger, meaner. I’m not alone in this lifetime fight either. Most of modern society views fat as far more offensive than that cuss-word f-word could ever be.