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

The post The Body Tourist in 34 Lines appeared first on Dana Shavin.

My husband and I live a half mile away in a house that is nearly 3000 square feet. We have an acre yard that until two months ago was the province of my two very elderly cocker spaniels, Shark and Bella. On our generous deck is a table the size of a small boat, which we bought because we have 10 friends we see every month, and we wanted to be able to seat everyone comfortably. It’s a lovely house and we got it for a steal when the market was soft. My favorite room is an upstairs garret where I do my writing and life coaching.

And yet my heart aches every time we pass the little house with the little chair and the little dog. I tell my husband I just want to see inside. That I’m  curious about how it’s laid out, whether the stove is a 2-burner or 4, how the living room chairs are configured, if theres a tub or a stand-up shower (my bet’s on the shower). I  wonder if there’s a sofa.

The truth is I don’t want to just see inside the house, I want to move in. But not MOVE IN move in. No, what I want is something infinitely more abstract (and somehow literal at the same time). Here I think of Annie Dillard’s passage about waking into adulthood: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” What I want is to live a life that fits me skin to skin: no wrinkles, no sagging parts, no excess. “Manageability” is the word I come up with for my husband, which is pretty good I think. There’s a great life coaching question, which is, “What if you were to think large?” So here’s a question: “What is the size of  your life, and what’s the size you want it to be?” Sometimes the urge to downsize might be a wish not to think small, but to trim excess, so that what needs to blossom can reach the light.

The post Thinking Inside the Box 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.

The post Who Deserves to Live Well? appeared first on Dana Shavin.