I Dreamt My Body

Or: Reflections of an Mres (cultural & gender studies) Student 

I dreamt my body in a warehouse

Hanging from the ceiling.

We planned to leave me there long enough for the lie to be read as truth.

I looked down on my feet, swaying, high above the floor and I feared, the deception being seen through, my body being shot, just to be sure.

I woke, my toes cold, and uncovered,

My quilt tossed aside.

Rub-a-dub dub, three masters students in a pub,

In a corner, dark and damp,

By the low light of a lamp,

One lass proclaims:

I kind of always hoped I’d grow up a lesbian.  Except the thought of going down on a girl is kind of unappealing.

and I respond, sure, but the thought of doing those things to a man isn’t much more exciting.

I stare at the wall. At an actual, literal wall. But maybe a metaphorical one too.  So many years of romance novels, of love songs, of wishing for a happily ever after, of being a morally good evangelical, of running from Cixous and De Beauvoir, of feeling offended by the liberals, coming home to the socialists, squirming at the radicals, but never ever pausing to consider what was beyond the veil of compulsory heterosexuality, because cloaked in the veil I had been unable to see it. And perhaps I will crawl back to them and utter, excusez moi, je vais ecrire maintenant. And I will write, this is all well and good, but what if, after years and years of being this person I rejected her, and, constituted a sexuality that is not one?

We see our bodies as a landscape

Of borders and unknowable terrains.

I planned to leave myself unknown until such time as…

… But now it’s been over a year since the first time the last man held my body against his, and maybe there will be another, and maybe there won’t.

In his kitchen, blues music, softly sweetly, and my cheek, my chest against his, and then suddenly but not surprisingly my lips against his.

Another day, I would drive away from his house and feel some sense of obligation to record the first time he crossed the borders of my body, but I left that page blank.  

On a Saturday night, a tired broken girl lies in the arms of a broken boy, and she wonders what it would be like if those arms were somebody else’s arms. He rolls over and goes to sleep and she lies awake and in her mind summons a vision of the face, the eyes of another. Tries to imagine their smile, wonders whether she would delight in undressing, in being undressed, in their company.  Would she delight in removing the veil, in uncovering herself? And if she takes out her phone, and sends a message in the middle of the night, will she be glad in the morning, will she want to stand somewhere proud and say, this is who I am, or softly, slowly, silently sink back under the sheets, the blanket, the quilt, wrapped in the warmth of the covers.

An intelligent woman, a beautiful woman, a research student, a teacher, starts dating someone. She says, it is so wonderful to be with someone who makes me breakfast in the morning. Someone who wants to shout out from the rooftops how great I am. Another woman says how nice it is to be with someone who listens when she cries. Elsewhere a woman steps out of the shower and cries for no reason in particular. Another crying woman imagines a new life taking form in her body, but immediately replaces the dream with one of loss, and tries to comprehend losing a life that never was. Across town another woman will sleep alone, afraid of the man she has left, because given a chance he would squeeze the life out of her. And we say don’t kiss frogs, but sometimes we only see the prince. Because despite everything, life teaches us that happily ever after is there for the taking. And maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But the ending, which is not an ending, is that we are here, the quilts tossed aside, our toes, our bodies, ourselves uncovered. It is that we are living and that we lived.