The Body is Nothing but a Map of the Heart
Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash
From a wild write dated November 2014. I think the prompt was “The body is nothing but a map of the heart.” But I’ve no idea where that comes from. Here goes:
The Body Is Nothing But a Map of the Heart
The body is nothing but a map of the heart, a map of the heart. My heart, the pathways to my heart so clearly visible. Blue veins and arteries branching across my chest and into my left breast. For as long as I have been able to notice, my body looks like a page in Grey’s Anatomy. Not the tv series. I’m sorry, none of us are that young. You know, the book. So pale so white, the tributaries so blue like Listerine, like a morphine drip. If I just had a tan, I used to think, everything would be ok. I still believe this, deep down inside. If Jesus came to me, as he has appeared to me before, if he came and had a conversation. Not just appearing as a feeling or a blinding light, but if he really appeared. If he said, ok, you’ve been a good girl and you can have a tan. Or you can have something else. You have five seconds to decide. I was about to write that I’d go for the tan. But maybe not. Maybe I’d come up with something better. But back when I was 14 a tan would have been the best present anyone could give me. Instead I got sunburns. Lots and lots of sunburns. I remember at the beach with my cousins and my little brother, spending all day riding a float in on the waves and spending all night covered in Noxema, as close to naked as our modesty permited, with a fan blowing over us. Burn victims all. Awake with the sting. Hoping it would turn into a tan. Or hoping it wouldn’t prevent another fun day in the waves. I remember standing in front of the mirror on the back of my closet door, where I regarded myself again and again, waiting for something good to show up. I remember so many times when I’d peel the skin off my shoulders, chest. The exquisiteness of getting started and carefully pulling so that that onion layer would lift off in a big swath like a sail. Redness taking its place beneath. I knew I’d be mottled and splotchy. That I was just calling attention to the sunburn and the lack of tan, but the skin peeling was so seductive, so satisfying. Like the way I still pick at wounds on my fingers until they become like warts. I revealed this to the other losers at a poker game last night. We were talking about tells and I confessed how I used to bite my nails and scratch my scalp until it bled. About how later on I typed silently on my thighs under the table when I was nervous. Like anyone really wanted to hear these fascinating and repellant things about anyone, let alone about me. But I was going for honesty and revelation. Waiting for someone to be explicit and say, “Hold up! Enough of this. Next you’re going to tell us about that smell you always noticed in the bathroom after your mother had been in there and how you wonder now if your boys notice your smell after you’ve been in the bathroom.” But nobody told me to shut up so I told them about how a papercut on my left index finger was now a small knob, white and slightly calcified. Hilary said it was like a wart, as she ran her thumb over it. Hilary is a nurse and she didn’t like my manufactured wart. She said I needed to stop doing that. Which was satisfying. That she cared. And I’ll probably stop as a result. Do I care about any of this? What I really want to say is that I used to be a nervous wreck. Nail biting fearful insecure mess. Not so much now. That’s why it surprises people to hear about my wound picking. Picking at a wound until I can no longer remember the original cause. Paper cut. Maybe? Knife slice. Burn from the side of a skillet. An arrow in my heart.
