The Body Tourist In 34 Lines

Chapter 1

“We’ve been robbed,” my mother says.

 Chapter 2

I sit down and hand him my resume which suggests, by omission, that I attended not three colleges but only the one that conferred my degree, and which lovingly details a six-month internship at the state hospital but says nothing about my collection of lost jobs.

Chapter 3

Rage in all its forms–impotent, seething, weepy, diabolical–was her only recourse.

 Chapter 4

To the observer I look like any new employee taking in the information about her duties—but behind the scenes, my heart is acting out a tragic drama in articulate palpitations.

 Chapter 5

Linda’s bifurcated world of puking and fucking is already beginning to wear on me, and I’ve known her for less than an hour.

Chapter 6

“It smells like a train station in here.”

 Chapter 7

He winks.

 Chapter 8

My peers’ outward accoutrements of sophistication paled in the face of my American boy and our king-size box of condoms.

 Chapter 9

It’s a proven fact that everything that happens to an addict is someone else’s fault.

 Chapter 10

I was in love—not with freckled, butterfly-loving, ten year-old Richie, but with the troubled boy-man with the mysterious, brooding core, the Richie undone by his own father, the bewildered, betrayed Richie who, in the moment before he died, might have looked up from the hole in his chest with a mix of apology and incomprehension.

 Chapter 11

“Do not fuck him.

 Chapter 12

I am vaguely aware of being angry now at my own anger, and doubly angry with my father for making me have to be mad at myself.

 Chapter 13

At the heart of my predicament is the relationship I have developed with my illness: the love affair I have with feeling in exquisite control of my appetite, and the reprieve I feel in focusing on food instead of the real issues—my loneliness for example, my many fears, and now, my father’s illness.

 Chapter 14

A lifetime of sickness and management, an incalculable madness that began as a benign thrumming in his chest and translated to the malignant rattle of pills in his pocket, ceases, with a profusion of tumors in his bladder, to exist.

 Chapter 15

We groped.

 Chapter 16

‘Up and coming’ is a euphemism for ‘down and out,’ my mother says.

 Chapter 17

Something in me is fumbling toward a larger realization that has to do with my mother and my mother’s mother, with the kinds of loss that pull us up and away, out of the warm lake of childhood and into the dry, cool lap of a world we won’t fully understand until we are older.

 Chapter 18

Patti holds the baby out to me and I do not reach for it.

Chapter 19

“You might not make friends easily, but I do.”

“Chapter 20

“It’s a long story,” I say, although it really isn’t any longer than “sex.”

 Chapter 21

The fact is, unless I am a social worker or a probation officer, I have no business being in this North Augusta neighborhood, and so I move in.

 Chapter 22

The area that presently concerns me is the narrow strip of terrain between my navel and my crotch, the gentle female swell whose existence I have always believed I must nullify in order to be found praiseworthy and desirable.

Chapter 23

“I don’t want to be happier!” I yell.

 Chapter 24

I have only to do this simple thing—decline Austin’s hand in marriage—to set myself free.

 Chapter 25

Wouldn’t it be funny if I fell from a balcony onto a freeway?

 Chapter 26

Blind certainty believes, utterly and wholly, in itself.

 Chapter 27

Beside me in the passenger seat my paycheck lies open and smoothed flat, and every few seconds I look over at it admiringly like it is a new baby.

Chapter 28

It certainly does not occur to me to consider that Fisher, unable to dress properly or cook for himself, might, like the house itself, have good bones but cavernous deficiencies.

 Chapter 29

“I just know how sneaky Jesus can be,” I say.

 Chapter 30

On the test, I claimed that my father was a good man and that I had never stolen from my workplace.

 Chapter 31

And then I remember: my father had an alias.

Chapter 32

His face, while handsome, lacks the deeply etched crease I so loved in Fisher’s, evidence (I believed) of profound thought, which left its mark on especially reflective men.

 Chapter 33

Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, bo’re p’ri ha‑gafen.

 Chapter 34

I have a recurring dream about a house.

 THE END

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“Well,” said the therapist, “You could just upset the apple cart completely.”

As I recall I stared at her in disbelief. Did people really do that? Decide that so little in their life was working that the only recourse was to chuck it all and start over?  It was the emotional equivalent of yanking the plug on some misbehaving, little-understood piece of technology and then plugging it back in with great expectations.

It was a terrible idea. But as a depressed, anxious, recently de-fathered 26 year-old, I couldn’t see this.  At that time, I believed PhDs didn’t have terrible ideas, or if they did, they used them for making hideous sofa choices. And so, three months after my father’s death, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, my best friend, my job, and the horse farm I lived on and adored, and moved to what was then the middle of nowhere.

Do I have to tell you the plan stunk? That I missed the boyfriend, the best friend, my coworkers, and the horses intensely? That what I had done, far from hitting the reset button on my life, was to heap sorrow, loneliness, and unemployment on top of grief, anxiety and confusion? I have to wonder: what did the therapist think might come of this apple-cart overthrow? Had she thought it through at all? If so, what did she think was possible?

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite questions to ask or be asked: What’s possible?  It’s a great question to ask yourself (or someone else) in times of  stuckness or uncertainty. I often wonder what would have come of my young self and my supposedly dispensable “apples” had the therapist taken the time to ask me, What’s possible if you upset the apple cart? What’s possible if you don’t? She could have even followed it with the deliciously abstract, often maddening, but almost always revealing, What else?  I might have still tossed the apples, but maybe I’d have at least salvaged the cart.

The post The Worst Advice I Ever Got appeared first on Dana Shavin.

I have always believed that messages are everywhere, told by things living, dead, and inanimate, and arriving through intention, accident, providence, coincidence. An evolving dog, a self-portrait ripped from a magazine, a fixed gaze and a snarl–these are like dream images to me, on and around which I am invited to craft what I most need to hear or learn. Boomer was like a personal oracle for me. At the time she was evolving, I was doing a bit of my own, looking into a new career. When she delivered her self-portrait to me, I was living in a veritable dump and needed to take a long, hard look at self. And when she snarled at my friend, I wondered: was there something she knew that I didn’t know?

Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life & you will call it fate.” So tell me: what messages are arriving on your doorstep right now that you aren’t listening to?

The post A Little Dog Shall Lead Them: Messaging the Universe One Snarl at a Time appeared first on Dana Shavin.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert
repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

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