How to Love a Wolf: Day 20, June 21, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: Day 20

So much.

I've been thinking about a 'dancer's body'...the ways this notion (it is about shape, form, and proportion) weaves its way into my psyche, masquerading as a deep and ancient law, but actually just a human feeling that is recent, contemporary: a flawed, mechanical, illogical notion of body. Fifteen years (more?) spent untangling my abdominals from the corset of my learned expectations and still, still, I pull those tissues in with an invisible tightening.

I think, "be careful what you wish for" over and over. I look at my naked body each morning, many evenings: fully, it is the outcome of my research in dance, in life. Soft, mobile, puckered. Not taut, flat, or hard. A post-it on my door reads: "*Use* your abdominals," as if to say, "use this treasure trove you unlocked, like a Pandora's Box." Or, as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen would say: "fat is stored energy; take it out of storage." So beautiful. So right. Where are the instructions?

When did I turn my power back over to the Gazes? It was recent: within the last four years. Or, was it not a turning but a continuous sloping, up and down, like cartoon waves, away from sanity and back toward it; waves traced on the welcomed curves of a belly allowed, or the fraught breath-defying arguments of a belly denied.

***

Four years ago I googled, "positive metaphors for cellulite," and then, "cellulite positive symbolism." I was sure this perspective was out there, somewhere. Someone, surely, had written about the riverbeds of flesh we call cellulite, about the ancient nobility of this wrought flesh, an inner dynamic rendering itself in the visible lair. What bravery, I thought, this tissue we call cellulite.

Nothing. That web that always returns something, returned nothing. I felt both alien and, yes, of course, of myself, in myself, armed with a wisdom as yet untethered to 'social' or 'media.'

Yesterday in the studio I reached down and felt my puckered thighs under my clothes. I checked again, not bothered, not disgusted, to learn with my fingerprint the unique rocky-watery terrain of my hopeful, longing flesh. I did not turn away. My impulse did not turn to scrubbing, sloughing, working, shaping, forming this flesh to be that Barbi-goal: smooth.

Did I like it? Yes—I'm checking my flesh now, in between typing these words. I can hear the crickets, the cars, the faint reminder of windy day still left in the trees. My forearms register the cool of this solstice more than, say, my shoulders or cheekbones. I imagine the riverbeds of my legs, and the beauty they bring to a forest no Gaze can encounter nor disturb.