you oughtta hear the mirror in my house

She's got a foul ass mouth. And the other day, when I was getting ready, I tried on 7 outfits. And that tall Sasquatch of mine, he came to the door, and he peered his beardy face around it, and stood there all swoony, looking like no one had ever been more comfortable in his own skin. He saw that I was in outfit number seven and said, "You know we are throwing this party, right?"  I huffed and mumbled my way out of #7, and into #8.

He went back to the living room, and I could hear him stand up, sit down, stand up again. And I shouted, "I'm sorry, it's just that self-loathing makes all my clothes fit weird." But the truth is, self-loathing has been shrinking my clothes for way. too. long.

And that mouthy little mirror, she's the mean girl at the party. So, about a year ago, I started giving myself these creepy little video pep talks. Things sucked. I sucked. It was a way to confront my endless distaste with my over emotive facial expressions, while circumventing the idea of participating in actual self-talk. I imagined having a conversation with a friend I loved dearly. I imagined being confronted with my own set of problems from an outside source, and then gave myself the best, most loving advice I could.

Then, I watched it back. Paused once in the middle to yak, because, seriously? And then watched it again. And again.  I watched the way I spoke. The way I raised my eyebrows, the sweetness I'd allowed for this person that I loved. I almost didn't believe it was me. But then, who else could it be?

I grew up hating my body. I despised the way pants that didn't want my wearing them, strained against my skin and left red marks. These were a sign of rejection. I hated the squeak of my voice, the perpetual optimism.

But now? I'm twenty three years old for christ's sake. I've lived a thousand lives. Kicked cervical cancer and blindness in the face. I graduated high school when I was sixteen. I'm a talented writer, a good friend, and sometimes I even smell nice. And I still let that mirror talk to me like I'm the dowdy vanilla ice cream sidekick in a 90's rom-com.
I could hand you forty freudian reasons for this gross over-analysis of the feud between my stomach and the elastic waistband of my minnie mouse skirts, but body-hate is body hate. I have both a physical aversion to and a morbid fascination with vanity and most of the time, I cringe at the idea of posing for a camera, of playing in front of it.

Yet this once removed courtesy, this gift of myself to myself, it started to change things. I started recording myself doing things I loved. Practicing monologues. Telling bad jokes. Watching a clip that I love and giggling to the point of hysterics.

And when it's me, when I remember that I'm watching Rachel, sometimes she has no top lip, and her gums are showing, and that is too much breast showing, and why doesn't her hair ever look put together? And heels, Rach? Really? That giant scar on your foot from when you got hit by the car? Well, it doesn't do your beefy calves any favors.

But when it's someone else, when I can forget for a second that that's me? I want to be that girl. She looks so damn happy.


And yeah, that's a lot of cleave. And yeah, a guy once told me that I'd be damn near perfect if I had a top lip, and yeah, sometimes, my catty mirror sounds an awfully lot like him. But I sometimes get so wrapped up in the magic of my own life, that I forget my entire body. And that girl is a disembodied golden light against the plain white walls of whatever rental she happens to be living in. And she's more than a wrinkled nose, she is the joy that wrinkled it.

And she doesn't let self-loathing borrow her clothes.

too much

"No,"

"Write a blog."

"No." I said, standing in the sagging seat of my old red reading chair, my arms around his shoulders, my eyes a half inch above his. "I'm bigger than you, for once, and I said no." I leaned in and knocked my forehead against his.

"Not much bigger." and he smiled that whole wheat smile and turned his greenhouse gaze on me. I felt myself blossom a little as he tilted his chin up to kiss me, raised his heels just slightly off the ground, and was once again the big to my little. "Just write something, please"

"Nothing doing." He kissed me again. And again. If our mouths in these last few weeks have been scrawling out the story of what we will be, our kisses have been the spaces between words. Sighs as verbs. Shoulder nibbles forming hour long inquiries into what it means to love. Me, chewing my lips as he talks, as he teaches without ever trying, saying with my bad habits: I hear you. I know you. And in the spaces between each silent conjugation of "to learn you," "to see you," a kiss to breathe. To pause it all.

I watched him turn to walk down the stairs, looping the half wall between my living room and I watched his sway, his comfort in his own body. I jumped from the seat of my reading chair, put one foot on the arm of it, cleared the gap between the half wall and the chair, and stood, leaning imperiously over him. My head touched the ceiling, and he was a half story below me. I needed five more seconds of the direct sunlight of his smile. I needed to feel myself expanding under it's light. So I stretched out over the stairs, to the teeter totter tipping point of my girlchild balance, told him it simply wasn't going to happen, and kissed him again.

These have been my mornings. These, and the longest cups of coffee known to man, pulling length from the rubber band moments that threaten to snap back and pull me headlong and stinging into the runaway glory of fuller days.

I have sat dreamily in front of this blog-love of mine. In front of this first illicit kiss of overshare tiny celebrity, and wondered what I would tell you. What is too much?

There is the line, always the line, between saying too much and saying too little. There is the foggy breath-now vapor-now finger drawn mirror note's difference between giving too much to the invisible interweb-world and not being able to give at all.

There are so many things I'd love to say, about the things growing inside of me. About the things I suddenly find germinating from seeds I already possessed under the watchful eyes of hope, of happening.

But there is not a breath of my truth which has not traveled through every part of me, which has not taken refuge from cynical eyes in my most intimate places. So I said "No, nothing doing." when all I meant was "Yes, let's tell it all, and tell it bold, and tell it loud."

Sometimes I'll be sitting perfectly still, or reading, or talking nine miles per second and I'll feel my heartbeat in my fingers, in the backs of my knees, in the tender places behind my ears, and that vigilant always waking place behind my eyes. I can feel my pulse the very mitochondria of my cells and I'm almost certain that I am nothing but one big beating heart. I feel with utter certainty that these limbs are arteries and that I am a mass of ventricles and this squeezing, sloshing, fluttering sinew of a human being will at any moment be shocked into life or death by the merest electric hope.

So how do I bare just enough, when any bit of me is all of me? How do I only say his name, and not blush. How do I only tell the philosophy without the truth? How do I tell of the fullness, without detailing the very chemical compostion of all those things which have brought me near to bursting.

I think I won't. I think, before the curtain falls, I'll have said it all.