The Inking

I was standing, barren, flat and unbuilt in the mirror that ran the length of the shop thinking how very much my ribs looked like mile markers and my body looked like a cartoon skeleton, breastless and pushed around by invisible scribes. You see, then, during the weeping summer, I lacked the sinue and tissue to move. Air floated me. 

Tommy watched in his angled way and I could see him in the mirror, looking at this canvas of a person I had become, assembling notes on positions and weights. The wild eyes, the impassioned quiet…it was all there and I didn’t know how to see his face and not reach for him. 

When he touched me, he closed his eyes and, like braile, tried to read me, read the  the bones that made me. He’d known a full me, with the flesh and bounty that covered me when I carried, so briefly and distinctively, our boy. 

Settled in, topless and adjusting to the pinch of my permanent art being etched, I couldn’t remember, what, exactly, in the room I’d seen before. So, instead of parceling our past from Tommy’s present, I decided I’d seen it all: the plastic skulls, the railcars, the heaps of intentionally unkempt paper, the dirty doll, the 50’s plate…the fusion of all the pieces that made him in to walking art. I had never noticed it was a room of toys, of bits and bobs, tiny pieces to erect a whole man. 

I turned back, inked now, careless with my skin because skeletons can’t quite be bashful. In the mirror and unforgiving light, I seemed just a piece of this muddled collection. It wasn’t me, but just a pack of sticks that stared back. To Tommy, I was standing and speaking as if brave. But.  I am a new object too, a toy reconstructed from cast off parts. I am not the woman with the baby or the bright eyes or the hopes of a humid summer behind her. This thing, this body-this me-is a Halloween costume, a version of me that feels like Mona Lisa redone in crayon.