You Wear It Well

My left leg was propped on the front porch railing in a frog-like position; my right planted firmly on the ground at a thirty degree angle.  I was admiring my smooth, shapely, calf.  Lightly tanned by dog-walking in the mid-morning sun.  Shaped by dancing and stretching and exploring then I noticed my knee. 

A fine knee, by all accounts.  Clean of scars.  Soft.  Then above it, at the very bottom of my thigh, a set of creases that announced the passage of time.  Not with a loud cacophony, but softly as if expressing a fact to someone young and trusting.

I’ve examined my face before.  A vertical crease between my eyes that gossips about confusion and too much light.  The subliminal, insignificant message that has become my lips trapped between this-isn’t-important parentheses.  Visible curves and twists that tell of too much laughter and not enough seriousness.

Hiding those trinkets of my history, that residue of experience, is a preposterous notion.  I welcome time’s imprints on my body.  The creases that reveal how I’ve lived.  The scar leftover from an aggressive dog.  That insolent hair that sprouts full grown from the middle of my chin every few months, like a billy goat’s, then is plucked only to sprout again.  The finely shaped legs and rear that whisper of activity and fortitude.  The pale, soft marks tied to my stomach and my breasts that remind anyone who sees them that I was once overindulgent and uncontrolled around pizza, steak and beer.  The perfect teeth that laugh of perfect health.

My story is sketched on my body.  A story that keeps me here.  That creates astonishing strength and zest for humor and a wandering eye and intelligence and unexplained anger.  And all the things that build a human.  Burning that book or tearing out the unsavory pages is a censorship of truth.  A dismissive hand to history that says things that created a body or a nation or a world never happened.

A body is a vehicle.  A bound fabric glossy glued book cover that ensnares the story inside.  A mode of transportation that carries me or you or them from here to there, ignorance to knowledge, alone to companionized, insignificant to crucial, confused to enlightened.  Its cosmetics are as unimportant as its treatment after all the experience dies.  Stifling the story is just a shameful, heartbreaking lie.