Out of Body

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My ex boyfriend was tall; but, perhaps out of respect for others shorter than him, was able to make himself, by optical illusion, (leaning,) into someone whose tallness was not a factor of his personality. I once told him, almost flirting, “I feel so bad for tall people. If you fall it’s such a long way down,” which in retrospect was almost a neg, a weird self conscious short person thing to say.

Let it be known, if he was a tree: Willow; he had long hair that used to fall down around my face like a curtain when we kissed. The first time we hung out (almost entirely alone,) he was visiting my college, having departed from the same institution a semester before. We watched the movie “Foodfight!”, together; in which Charlie Sheen plays Dex Dogtective: a cereal mascot come to life in an epic battle of the brands. It is known for its abysmal computer animation, but not for its plot, which under no circumstances can be followed, especially when the soft part of your arm is touching the soft part of your neighbor’s arm.

The first time we spent completely, entirely, alone, in my dorm room; we began to take off our shoes.

I said: “Okay. If you have a foot fetish, you have to tell me now.”

He said: “No, I don’t have a foot fetish, but I do crave Mommy’s milk.” 

He sounded dead serious. For a week I was partly convinced that I may have to brandish a nipple and speak in babytalk. This is a testament to how much I liked him. When I brought it up again, he was dismissive. “I was joking!” Oh. I can be very literal. 

But he liked me. He told me he had dreams about me. At many moments I felt myself caught in the beam of his gaze, conscious of being imperfect. Undressing, sometimes. When his face came too close – “too close” which always seems to be the distance needed for kissing. I have seen myself up close; the patches in my makeup, how small my eyes become without liner; the same I’ve worn since I was 15. I know men must have these same thoughts about themselves, but the romantic idea is always that they don’t. That men enter a space and map the room, and occupy it exactly as it should be occupied. 

I would like to think that this is that easy: that women have bodies and men don’t, or don’t know they do, or don’t know they have to. That, unlike me, men know what to do with their arms. But I know this to be untrue. My first boyfriend, in high school, could become so anxious as to be unable to bend his arms. He held them slightly away from his body. The action seemed protective. If you have ever watched a man under the age of 25 cross in front of you, alone, on the street, you can see almost a heat map of tension; there in his shoulders, there in his knees. With a larger body comes all sorts of new variables. You are not supposed to be large, in this world, even if it isn’t fat, per se. I imagine the sprawl of my semi-suburbia in miniature, like the diorama in Beetlejuice, and each time I enter a store or walk down the street, I imagine a man with a pair of tweezers, trying to fit me in. His hand is shaking, I can feel it. I am shaking; threatened constantly by others’ eyes. 

We are all meant to be dollike: to the powers that be, we are dolls. Dolls have no genitalia. The more I see the body as a gendered thing the more miserable I grow. None of the men I’ve been involved with have loved their bodies, either. If you cannot find a way to exist without feeling your body doesn’t, there is no moment of relaxation. This is how even sex became, or perhaps always was, unbearable for me.