The Appointment

All that rubbish about souls is simply not true, that you can love a soul independent of the shape it comes in. Our brains are made so that we can only love a cat as a cat and not as a bird or an elephant. If we want to love a cat, we want to see a cat, touch its fur, hear it purr, and get scratched if we get our petting wrong. We don't want to hear it bark, and if the cat started growing feathers, we would kill, study, and finally, exhibit it as a monster.

I think that our bodies know things long before our minds, Dr. Seligman; they will have all the words written on them long before our tongues can find them and our teeth can pull them apart in the empty space between our gums.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I am being strong for the two of us, like I have broken free from those chains of lipstick and perfect hair and can take pride in my worn feet and the hair around my nipples. And I know that one day we will go shopping together and she will finally be proud of this body we both used to hate so much. I'm sure of it, because recently I have found it in my heart to forgive her. And because all of this is so very lonely sometimes, I have started to wear some of her old clothes, her cardigans and scarves--I was always too fat for everything else--and I think that's a sign that I have started to miss her in that place where I should have loved so long ago. And I admire nothing more than people who have found a way to love their mothers; I think it's the biggest challenge in life, the one thing that would make the world a better place.

I never told mine anything, because I always thought that silence was better than an open disappointment, than telling him a story he would never be able to understand.

But then we are most passionate when we worship the things that don't exist, like race, or money, or God, or, quite simply, our fathers.

I was alone, safe in the knowledge that my body had more or less ceased to exist in the face of this catastrophe. It was only much later [...] that I realised that no catastrophe, apart from maybe a final nuclear strike, would ever be big enough to free us from this curse. That even though we're in charge of this planet, we are its ugliest inhabitants, and that our longing for our own beauty will never cease, that we will never be content with the beauty in front of us. And yet I will never forget the feeling with which I ate that chocolate, [...] in that moment it was a sin without consequences. And I never gave up on the dream that one day my body wouldn't matter anymore.

I sometimes think some women, once they realise what it means to be seen as a mother, they find a way to strangle their unborn children in the womb using the same umbilical cord that would otherwise have chained them to a life of self annihilation and their mother-in-law's disgusting selection of homemade chutneys.

I tried for so many years to be something they call genuine, but now I know that I am not one thing but the product of all the voices I have heard and all the colours I have seen, and that everything we do causes suffering somewhere else.