SOMETHING LIKE UNWEAVING

We meet on a Thursday, my therapist and me. She’s draped in something handknit and green. I wonder if she made it herself or if her people are the kind to show their love through what their hands can do. Tell me about your week. It’s only our third meeting. I skip the hysterics of the honesty. I make her laugh about my chaotic boss who routinely nurses a stain sitting on his bleached white torso. How have you been handling the distance? I know she means from home, but I can’t help but think of the last person I kissed. He’s seven-hundred miles away, getting lost in the grit of New York and forgetting me. Are you still having the dreams? The nightmares? I don’t dodge. I tell her about the one where I’m nestling four brown eggs beneath my pillow. I tell her how I watch a snake fester itself into being. How it rattles its thin slick in my direction. As if to say it will make a meal of what I refuse to grow inside my body. How have you been feeling about your body? Do you still feel like it’s not yours? And she already knows my face when it’s thinking of a lie. So, I become a surge of truth: Once, I thought I was dying because I wouldn’t stop bleeding from places that don’t bleed easily. I started writing down passwords and account pins. I stashed notes for my sister behind books I knew she loved. I hoped by instinct she would shuffle them from their slots in my shelves just to see the pages I had marked. I realize how selfish that was. And how does that inform how you feel about your body? I tell her how tired I am. How truly tired I am of being told the latticework of my interior will always be more impressive than the rest of me. How maybe I’m beginning to believe it. How I feel like I’m losing. How all at once, all I want is to sit seamless into someone’s arms. How I’m ashamed that I miss being looked at like something good. Like some    thing. Like some    thing someone might want to lay next to. Or underneath. Or right on top. Or maybe deep inside. How lately I have no more fight. How lately I have been more womb than woman.