Self: Catalogued

She often wishes that she was sexless and that there was nothing pink between her legs. She tends to sleep deeply unless a streetlight or the moonlight comes in through her windows. She keeps herself secret by speaking over herself. She hides herself from others by announcing herself loudly, insisting on visibility, making sweeping claims, interrupting her friends.

She looks like this: brown hair, mostly brown eyes, a dignified nose—she thinks there is nobility in its size and aquiline shape, the bony crest at the bridge, its handsome, unapologetic presence—and a face that is half long and half short due to an arthritic joint in her left jaw that grinds against itself (even her body is compulsive, turning on itself, growing so many layers of extra skin that white plaques form at her elbows and behind her ears, and her joints mash into each other like mortar and pestles made of bone. She is coming apart at her hinges!), a long torso, nicely arched feet, white spots on all her fingernails, small breasts, and a tilted smile that shows more gum and tooth on the right side than the left.

She has recently taken up flossing. Her gums are raw and red, forming lifted flaps between each tooth, lifted away from the teeth by vigorous flossing. She crouches on the bathroom floor for her nightly inspection of the white thread. She feels de light when she sees pieces of food on the floss, and disappointment when it comes back clean and red. She shaves her legs from every which way. First, with the grain of her hair. Then, against it. And then, she comes across the leg in slight diagonal strokes until her legs are perfectly bald and as slippery as eels when she rubs her calves together under the bathwater.

She is afraid of organs and hates to notice the rise and collapse of her lungs as they inflate and deflate like a leather bellow. If she notices her eyeballs they begin to ache so much from the awareness that she cannot sleep. They press and strain against the wet underside of her eyelids. She often thinks about all the organs in her body, and what color they are. The color of cow tongue, of mold, of black currents? Spleen, pancreas, lungs, heart, stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, blad der, brain, ovaries, uterus, appendix, all fitted inside her like clothes in a suitcase. If she thinks about her insides she feels reduced to a bagful of squishy wet things that throb. The cavity of her torso does not seem big enough to contain it all. She thinks it’s strange that there are parts of herself she can never touch. She thinks it’s strange that there are purple things inside her that might be weighed on a silver scale and wrapped in brown butcher paper, or sliced diagonally and splayed across a serving dish.

She is also afraid of permanence, carbon monoxide gas leaks, natural gas leaks, impermanence, car crashes, blow jobs, tumors, multiple sclerosis, aneurysms, imper manence, unforgiving people, stalkers, deathbeds, touching herself, zebra mussels, exposure, the afterlife, shark mouths, decomposition, reincarnation, outer space, physics, pornography, fault lines, fires, ash, subtropical climate zones, rising sea levels, talking too loud, talking too fast, sudden infant death syndrome, the smell of refrigerated leftovers, irritable bowel syndrome, disemboweling, gods, roaches, spiders, spider crickets, intubation, feeding tubes, urinary catheters, barbiturates, and children.

She was not so afraid of death when she did not love her life.