Honey Wash
My (almost) perfect body lasted through one bottle of bath wash.
The soap was trying to smell like honey and succeeded with the kind of chemical veneer we recognize. I know how real honey smells because we harvested from our bees last week. That yellow-tinted soap smelled like chemicals trying their best to interpret what honey should be, not what it is.
What it should be versus what it is. My mind is doing that chemistry too, and it has been most of my life. I’m guessing most of yours too. What we should be - in terms of workers, women, parents, humans with faces and bodies walking down the street.
For the last few months, I got close to where my mind told me my body should be in terms of size. It’s a longstanding discussion inside my skull. A shouting match, a whisper in my ear for decades. But recently I got pretty close to the self-imposed ideal. It would have been hard not to with the training I needed to finish for the trail race in August. I tried not to revel in it but there was always that naysayer sitting in the cheap seats saying, no reason to be happy, it will all go away soon enough.
But I knew, even as my fingers grazed my hipbones during those summer months, that it wouldn’t last. More specifically, that I didn’t have the will or the desire to do the necessary amount of activity to keep it that way. I even said it to myself out loud in the shower, it won’t last. Putting on my pajamas, eating breakfast, it won’t last, embedding sweat onto the seat of the car after a few hours on the trail. Don’t enjoy it too much because then the missing it will be worse.
Don't Enjoy It Too Much; The Missing Will Be Worse
Don't Enjoy It Too Much; The Missing Will Be Worse
Losing something I had achieved after wanting it for so long seemed harder than losing something I had only a notion of.
The easy way, the road without curves (and the body without many either), is to stop the wishing. To not even reach for the perfect (or almost perfect). To dismiss perfect as a viable option. To say that is gone and it’s never coming back and I don’t even want it. Because do I? Of course. But I don’t want to work that hard - and do I smell a hint of a victory within the giving up?
I had a season with that body. A short one. One where I said thank you to it many times, because it did extraordinary things I didn’t think it could. But I still wasn’t happy because I knew it would return to its previous state soon enough, and it has. The difference is likely appreciable only to me, the one who exists within its skin.
Maybe this finding-keeping-losing is the thing that lets me open my fist and free the idea that it should be a thing. That the thing could also be: I am up, moving forward, altogether ready, coated with sweetness on the skin and on the inside.
If Only I Let It
If Only I Let It
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