You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.

People were such fragile things: they only existed from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing.

Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong. Anything could be inside. It’s no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.

It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular.

Tell me, is there someone in your life who's been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who's been taking up your time and not giving any of it back?

I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels.

I was worried that there’d be emotional spillage, maybe even some tears, and comforting strangers always made me feel like a pervert.

Why can't you just let people have their own inner lives, as long as they're doing pretty much what they're supposed to with their outer lives?

He must have a lover of his own, some man or woman or animal whose absence hurt like a presence, some person that he poured himself into like a mold to remind himself of what he was.

A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.

Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.

These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have.

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it.

Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means.

I heard stories about her, mostly stories about her biting people.

Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance.

I wished that I could speak to him, ask him who was in control of this ad campaign and whether it was awful or just much more convenient to have another person controlling your identity.

You already help," she said to me. "just by being here, you make it more.

A woman’s body never really belongs to herself.

Well, honestly,” he said. “Lots of girls look the same from behind.

she’d say that borrowing brought you closer to other people, while buying mostly made you lonelier.

There was an uncontrollable amount of me within myself, and I didn't know how to stop it.

At any given present moment a person was doing one thing, maybe three things. They were lying down, and they were reading a sentence, and possibly they were thinking about what they were doing. Or they were reaching for someone's shoulder, and noticing a mole on someone's back, and feeling their own breath leave their chest. Any piece of time is lonely and pale in isolation, and moments resemble other moments, so that sometimes you feel that you are a memory being called to mind by someone else.

You're like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it.

DO YOU EVER FEEL LOST, DESPERATE, OUT OF CONTROL IN TERMS OF YOUR THOUGHTS, OR AS THOUGH YOUR FEELINGS HAVE FEELINGS OF THEIR OWN? 'No,' I said. 'I feel even and Bright. My feelings are pretty much responses to what happens in the dail management of Darkness. Feelings of fulfillment when I work. Et cetera.

We can live in a house with a roof and a kitchen, surrounded by neighborhood. We'll both get jobs. We'll never talk about them. We'll watch TV together, things like that.