My body answers my letter

I wrote this in a workshop from Reclaim Your Voice led by Jungle Flower and it surprised me. The prompt came in two parts: Write a letter to your body (something I've done many times) and write a letter from your body. I'd never done that before. Jungle invited us to take a compassionate tone when writing from our bodies and it was more challenging than I expected. I hadn't thought about the doubled edge of my anger and mistrust and resentment, that what I have felt and continue to feel about my body has a counterpart. Equal, not so much opposite. Not so much reaction.

What would your body say to you if it could tell you in your own language?

Dear Priscilla,

When we were young, we loved to watch your father build things in his den. While he was carving a statuette from a block of sweet-smelling wood or taking apart a broken VCR to understand its insides, we would sit on the workbench and study his process: the way he selected and held his tools, the deft movements of his hands, how he always seemed to know exactly what to do.

This is how you came to look at us. You wanted us to be like that VCR. Somewhere in the neatly packaged collection of our internal workings, you wanted there to be an answer. A diagnosis. A solution. Find the right tool, repair the error, close us up and listen to us purr.

I know that by now you know, but still I’ll say it: Your father didn’t know exactly what to do. He didn’t solve every problem that came up. He chose the wrong tool and fucked up the works plenty of times. He just didn’t share that, because of course he didn’t.

I will tell you this, too: Even if we spoke often and at length in our shared language, even if we grew up like besties from small to tall, we would never get it exactly right. We would never be perfectly in sync all the time. We would misunderstand one another, make mistakes, get hurt, get angry. We could only be what we have always been: perfectly, messy, human.

Look, we’ve never been best friends. We’re acquaintances at best, neighbors sharing a wall (and a liver, lungs, and intestines). If you passed me on the street, we wouldn’t wave. Maybe we’d make eye contact and our mouths would flinch into a nervous smile but we’re not huggers. You’d keep walking, no mention to your companions of that echo you left behind.

And I’d follow you. And when you got tired, I’d carry you. We’d go farther than you thought you could manage and when our feet ached and our back tightened, you’d get angry. You’d call me unreliable, uncooperative. Too delicate.

I know that you’re working on it — the anger, the impatience, the distance. And I’m supposed to be proud of you. Grateful.

We don’t speak the same languages, and we don’t read them either. You’re big on words and images and those five senses. My texts are different: firing synapses and hormone levels. I divine drama in chemical balances, study history from our epigenetics, intercept the notes passed between our cells to stay up to date on the chisme.

I know why you don’t trust us. Why you look at us like conspirators working against you. I know you haven’t been getting our messages.

And I promise that I’m trying not to be angry with you.

I am trying not to resent you.

Like you’re trying not to blame me for holding the trauma that you couldn’t carry on your own.

You’re surprised. You still don’t know how close we are, how there is no line between our skin and yours, how we’ve only ever had one: heart, mind, voice. How we survived because we survived.

We are trying not to be angry. We are trying to be patient. But you don’t need to worry.

We’ll be here.

Always,

Body

What would your body say to you? What's it saying already? What have you learned of your body's language? Drop me a comment, or come to a co-write and write it out with me.