I stopped writing to find my body
on taking punches
I'm right over here
Why can't you see me?
Oh oh oh
—Robyn, “Dancing On My Own”
From mid-June to late December of 2024, I wrote a 68,000-word novel. I was quite diligent about it, with the exception of mid-July to mid-August, a period in which I was occupied with packing, and moving, and unpacking all of my belongings and my boyfriend’s belongings. In the chaos of so many boxes stacked precariously atop each other, lining the walls as though they were closing in, I began to see those boxes as little parcels of my own meat, separated from me and conglomerated into some terrible beast. But I digress.
I woke at 6:15 each morning for work - my “real job” at which I earn wages - and finished at approximately 2:30 each afternoon. I ate some forgettable, not very good meal. I perhaps did some stretches on the floor. I went for a long, aimless walk that ended up being too similar to the previous day’s long, aimless walk, frustrating me deeply. A little rat in a little cage. I undertook some kind of errand, maybe picked up a few groceries from the store. I returned home.
And then I started my second job, writing the novel, which I always did in bed. In some inexplicable way it did not feel proper to me to perform this kind of work from the desk, which is where I did and still do all the work for which I am paid.
I wrote a novel lying down. I forged connections between sentences with my mind until I was too tired to continue. There was a point each night where the connections would simply stop, as though I had approached a vast white wall.
I wrote a novel lying down. And each night when I considered my work to be at an impasse, I rose quietly from bed, ate and washed up, folded laundry, wiped down countertops, cleaned myself in the shower, and returned to my bed, where I watched ASMR videos until I fell asleep. Like clockwork.
I wrote a novel lying down.
When I think about it now, my body had no part in it at all.
I ask you to punch me
In the stomach
Like my father used to
To show he could take it
—Me, in a poem I wrote in December, “Boxer”
I finished my novel on December 20th, 2024, at 5:26 p.m. A Christmas present to myself. I saved it to my computer as a PDF. Now my downloads folder says this was “A long time ago.”
I have not edited it since then. I consider it complete. (I took a writing workshop in November in which Charlene Elsby said that she writes with a sheet of paper covering the screen of her computer so that she cannot see what she is writing, and this will forever validate my tendency to write without ever looking back on what I have written, as though I am setting a fire and sprinting from it in order to escape accountability from the damage it causes, mostly to me.)
Also in December I wrote a poem called “Boxer.” It is the longest poem I have written in a very long time, at three pages. It is many things, but first and foremost I consider it an ode to how fucking strong I am. Physically. It is, literally, a celebration of my muscles.
I have not written another poem since then.
Last month I signed up to run a half-marathon later this spring. I texted my friends “it feels so good to have a goal to work toward that like doesn’t involve my brain.”
I got a gym membership. I started running on the treadmill and in the park. I started going to the sauna. When my body was soaked and I could not take it anymore I stepped out of the sauna and drank water and went back in. It felt like there was something murky and insidious beneath my skin that needed to be excised like malignant tissue. I waited and waited for it to leave me. I am waiting but I think it is starting to. To leave.
When I try to pinpoint where it is I think of my face - behind it, as if it has some kind of interior doppelganger. She thrives in darkness and shadow. She is ever-fertile like bacteria, like fistfuls of wet black dirt.
Perhaps she served some purpose to me once and that is why she exists. But I tell her, you are not needed now.
Now I need my arms and my legs. The sun and my sweat.
I do intend to write again, I think. I am not so naive as to think the face behind my face will disappear forever. The hardest lesson I have had to learn and learn and learn is that I think temporary things are forever and forever things are temporary. But it is good to think that way, I think.
It is good to believe in myths, for they serve the purpose of augmenting our purpose.
Perhaps by mythologizing my body its decay will feel less tragic.
No performance can last forever.
One day there will be a punch I cannot take.
It is likely that I won’t see it coming, but even if I do, I don’t think I would try to duck.
“So it is true after all, not merely
a rule of art:
change your form and you change your nature.
And time does this to us.”
—Louise Glück
from Parable of the Dove
Love how you write so honestly