Rachael Greene

Flesh Record

Rachael Greene

I watched a timelapse of a blond fitness influencer doing yoga this morning. The word bubble hovering above her in the clear blue sky read, If it feels good and you’re breathing, you’re doing yoga! I think of this as I sit on my own yoga mat, inhaling activated body odor after three days without a shower. If you were to ask me why I’d gone this long without a shower, I’d tell you it’s because I’m recovering from the side effects of yet another booster shot, but really I’ve succumbed to the overwhelming dread that I will never be able to keep up with the unrelenting accumulation of filth on my body, dust in my home, emails in my inbox, headlines on my phone, and excuses I’ve used already.

To stop fixating on these things, I sit cross-legged and concentrate on how slowly each breath goes in, filling all sides of my belly until it’s up into my chest, and out, lungs deflating as I squeeze my abdominals, gently rolling my insides up like an air mattress. At the start of the influencer’s timelapse, this slow process looks like staccato gasps, her torso pumping air like an erratic respirator. This visual effect more closely reflects my frantic thoughts than the act of sitting quietly. I focus on my sits bones pressing into the floor until I imagine roots sprouting out of them and into the ground. I search impatiently for that elusive sense of calm that only seems to come when I’m not paying attention. It feels like trying to watch a tree grow. I’m perpetually tempted to give up until, somehow, I forget about the passage of time, the measurement of it. Suddenly, I can sense the imperceptible. It is impossible to forget about time when recording oneself. The very notion of a timelapse is to fold time, reducing it to a highlight reel of perceptible movements. Stillness becomes the thing unseen.

I like to interrogate my heartrate after workouts on my Apple Watch. The rhythm is depicted in a series of vertical red lines that look more like a sound wave than the jagged mountain range of hospital monitors. Each vertical line marks a fluctuation in my heartrate. The gaps between them are mere voids, as if my heart is simply off grid during these intervals, again unlike the hospital monitor’s constant, jumping line which remains even after a heart stops—the unbroken thread. The activity app maps my workout from start to finish, showing exactly where my heartrate elevated and recovered. Here I did five sets of squats, four rests in between, followed by five sets of bench presses again punctuated by rests, then five sets of bent rows, and there, near the end, a segment of lines suspended above the rest—the dreaded cardio finisher. I feel mildly disappointed whenever I come to the end of one of these workouts. Although I can recall performing the motions in real time, the visual account of my heart’s rhythm is mesmerizing. It makes me want to see my entire day in vertical lines, each one ticking off the minutiae with pinpoint accuracy—the burst when I finally walked to the mailbox, the lull I spent doomscrolling—a heartbeat for every moment. Life measured in (ideally) unwavering intervals. A flipbook of individual efforts and stillnesses. A timelapse in heartbeats.

I wonder what other things my body might be recording. If my hands, upturned on my knees remember

the surface of everything they’ve touched—the cold slime inside the bowl pulled from the dishwasher, the evocative crisp pages of a new planner, the patchy hot and cold of the doughy flesh of my stomach. I move my hands there now, pressing lightly to feel my deepening breath. Belly breath. I learned this term from another yoga video. It’s when you initiate the inhale from your core, rather than your chest. Breathing this way grounds the nervous system, as if the direction of your breath could literally tether you to the earth. I imagine again the roots now spreading from my sits bones burrowing deeper into the ground, anchoring me with each rise and fall of my belly. I feel unmovable.

I think of my grandmother whenever I hold the flesh of my belly like this. She was a petite Italian woman, but her midsection grew disproportionately to the rest of her body over the years. Her mother, my great grandmother, also had a voluptuous belly. The Paolucci Curse, as my mom and aunt call it, after her family name. For as long as I can remember, they have battled to control their waistlines, alternately teasing and soothing one other over their abstentions and indulgences. It can’t be helped, they say, firmly believing it can. The focus they give this particular area of the body is as disproportionate as my grandmother’s figure, as the idea of a curse itself.

I’ve heard that gaining weight in the midsection can occur as a response to trauma—the body’s way of protecting itself, shielding vital organs even when the threat is not physical. The effects of trauma, we’re learning, can be genetic as well. Passed down through generations. Epigenetics looks at the ways trauma effects not the genes themselves, but the expression of genes. Studies of famine survivors—human and worm—show that survivors’ offspring tend to be smaller even when they are amply nourished. As if the genes remember the possibility of famine and prepare for its likelihood even though the offspring is not exposed to it—history manifesting in the body, literally shaping it. Also inherited through altered gene expression is what one study on C. elegans worms refers to as toughness. How this toughness is identified remains unclear in my reading of the study, but I imagine a tactile hardening of the worm’s membrane, a protective shell.

When she was still young, my grandmother lost a child to walking pneumonia. He was two. My mother was old enough to remember what would have been her youngest brother, and my grandmother’s grief. Sadly, the loss of a child was not the only source of grief in my grandmother’s life. She had married a charming Scots-Irishman who turned out to be an alcoholic and philanderer, as well as a criminal, forcing the family to relocate often. My mother remembers these things too, and more which she does not tell me. She stuck by him through it all, she says, her lips clamping together as if she tastes underripe fruit.

Unlike my grandfather, my great-grandfather doted on my grandmother growing up—she was the favorite of his four daughters. In an era when slaughtering a chicken for the meat was a luxury, he gave her the choice breast meat. We weren’t rich, she would say, but we always had enough. When he was a young man, my Great Grandpa Paolucci emigrated from Italy to escape World War I, only to be drafted and sent back to fight in the trenches of his homeland. During hand-to-hand combat he was bayoneted in the stomach—a fatal wound in a pre-antibiotic era— yet he survived. After the war, he worked as a coal miner in West

Virginia, descending into the belly of ancient mountains until his lungs carried enough of their dust to reclaim him to the dirt. My grandmother kept his domed oval photograph hanging across from her rocking chair so she could gaze at him whenever she rocked herself back and forth, hands resting on her stomach, the way my hands rest now.

I have not always liked touching this part of my body. As a teenager I recoiled from it, did everything I could to conceal even the slightest bulge around my middle. When I sat, the fold in my skin was unforgivable, the fact that my jeans dug into it confirmed this. It’s those low-rise jeans, my mother would say. In my room I would stand in front of the mirror, hunched over, gripping handfuls of living flesh and dream of severing it. Red fingernail marks scoring the line I would cut. Remembering it now, it was like the videos of girls who miscalculate when cutting their own bangs. Instead of letting it hang naturally, they stretch the hair down in front of their eyes and snip—it sticks out straight in rebellion when they let go. Had I got my wish, I never would have stood up straight again. Curves stood as the antithesis of early oughts’ beauty ideals.

That line where low-rise jeans used to hit, the dent my mother was so adamant it was creating, is still there today, though I have not worn low-rise jeans in more than a decade. It turns out this is a natural curve where belly meets pelvis, an elegant scoop immortalized in sculpture and artwork long predating the low-rise phenomenon. For better or worse, my figure has always bent toward the classical. I sit cross-legged and lift my chest, abdominals bowing outward unthwarted—the counter pose to my entire adolescence.

The night I was born, my grandmother sat anxiously by my mother’s round belly, camera poised to commit my first moments to film. But when I emerged, a hush fell over the room. You were blue, my mother tells me. Stillborn you could say, as if stillness were the affliction and not the umbilical cord wrapped twice around my neck. There is no photographic evidence that I came into being that night. My grandmother kept her lens lowered. Every year on my birthday, my mother reminds me that I was born two minutes before midnight, although I’ve since learned that she chose to go by the delivery room clock The doctor’s watch read midnight. You were almost born on a different day. It seems to me I was almost not born at all. A silent child slipping between days. Blue, the color of night, the color of vast things. Blue, the color of stillness.

My breath finds a natural rhythm, no longer proactive. My hands still rest on my belly, the part of me I have rejected and reclaimed more times than I can count. The fact that I can keep my hands here without pulling away or feeling a visceral discomfort I perceive as growth. I have always had a low tolerance for sustained physical contact, with myself and others. Perhaps I am cold. Perhaps my childhood made certain expressions difficult for me. Circling my neck are two prominent creases, like wrinkles or choker necklaces. I have always had them since childhood. I catch myself tracing them with my fingers sometimes when I am nervous or uncomfortable. I wonder, is it possible that my body still remembers, all these thirty-odd years later, that it is safer to be unencumbered?

In 2021, I was diagnosed with Hashimotos, an autoimmune disorder tricking the thyroid into attacking

itself, causing hypothyroidism. The doctor explained this to me, though she didn’t need to. My mother has Hashimotos. As do two of my cousins on my mother’s side. There is no treatment for Hashimotos itself, only the symptoms. After I left the doctor’s office I went straight to the nearest bar, not the pharmacy. I knew this bar from the year before when I found myself surrounded by the lunch crowd and drinking too much wine after the same doctor found nodules on my thyroid. We will have to take a biopsy if they grow too large, she said—meaning they had the potential to turn cancerous, but they wouldn’t. I knew this confidently. My mother has dozens of them, as did my grandmother. None of these dozens has turned against their hosts. As she aged, my grandmother’s throat began to sag, just slightly. An apron curve of skin above the collarbone. A trained physician can tell visually that this apron contains nodules on the thyroid. To my eyes, I see the echo of a belly, quivering with breath passing through it.

Side effects of Hashimotos include inflammation, fatigue, and with it, weight gain. With the daily dose of synthetic hormone my thyroid is incapable of producing itself, I can manage the fatigue, but my body naturally drifts toward softness. I don’t pinch my soft places bitterly anymore. Nor do I always embrace them. Most days striving for neutrality is enough. Resting my hands on my belly, I notice its fleshiness has patches that are cooler than others.

We are the sum of our experiences. Perhaps of our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences too. Collections of moments compressed into physical form, documented in the seemingly unseen parts that comprise us. Cells. Genes. A three-dimensional timelapse. Is this not evolution? The culmination of time and matter? There are no fresh starts. The body translates the grand biography of human DNA and appends it.

I think about what it means to hold all of this. Imagine physically holding it in my hands, in my belly. My body remembers my own life better than I do. It has changed many times. It has expanded and contracted. When I expand, I am desperate for weightlessness, and when I shrink, I crave the resistance—the weightiness—of gravity. A reminder that I am here.

Firmly rooted now, I imagine myself as a tree. Trees document their stories in rings around their trunks as they grow. The rings indicate seasons of drought and plenty. If the tree has survived fire. How long it grew and when it began decaying. Around my core, too, I’m convinced it’s all there—the trauma of my birth, the romanticized horror of childhood, the self-inflicted abuses of youth, seasons of illness and strength, of deprivation and gluttony, the disenfranchisement of being female in an oppressive culture, the mental and physical tax of a global pandemic, and the instability of the climate. A life discernable in layers of tissue. Rings of stories told in a delightful pattern of flesh.

I am vaguely aware that I have arrived at stillness, somewhere outside of time but inside my body. I count my rings, knowing that there will be more. Life has not finished writing itself into my body. My trunk has not finished growing.

In her last years, after my grandmother moved in with my mother, she would pat her swollen stomach endearingly, the way one pats a mischievous child on the head, and say, I’ve done my time. My mother and aunt hated when she did this. Looking back, it’s as if she knew her stomach embodied the years of turmoil and loss she survived. Even as a child I regarded her belly as a mythical figure, somehow sensed that it encompassed more than fat and organs and bile. As an adult now, I know—it was her prize for a life lived with an alcoholic and disloyal husband, her consolation for a child lost to illness, her insulation against these things. It represented the hard earned space she had inhabited, space her internalized grief had created, a right to no longer shrink herself. It held the life she had borne.