Chapter 22: Body Language
Someone once told me that craving a particular thing is your body’s way of trying to tell you important information. You want sugar because you’ve been eating too much of it. You want red meat because you’re low in iron. You want fresh greens because you’ve spent two weeks on holiday eating croissants and cheese. You want to eat an entire pot of mashed potatoes to fill up the hole where your heart was. You want what’s bad for you, you want what’s good for you, you want to access the knowledge buried deep in your blood and bones. You squint at cells, as if DNA is printed on them like a list of ingredients.
But a body can tell you about other types of hungers. What if in my joints I can feel an ache for a city? What if my deep fascia is made not of connective tissue but of knitted-together desire for a person? What if it’s not blood that runs through me but the melted remains of everything I never left behind?
A friend writes to me: “I have often wondered if you would have, could have been more yourself if you had grown up somewhere else.”
The me that I am is a very particular me, built over time of any number of parts, many of which are unmistakably products of my environment. Not all. Somewhere else I would have been rebellious and too chatty. Everywhere else I would have been like a pint of ice cream, quick to soften and with a wide ribbon of melancholy running throughout the core of me. But I wonder about the others. Like that part of me that felt so keenly the distance between myself and others. The part that needed to close the distance, no matter the risk or what was required to do so. Would I have wanted that no matter where I was?
What is need, anyway. If your body tells you it needs something, how can you be sure it’s need and not want? Need and not an idle fancy? Need and not a sleight of hand, or of stomach, or of heart?
Or maybe the problem with the body and its wants and needs is how can you know ever really which one to listen to. How can you ever know which is the right one, and which one will lead you down the long path far away from whoever it is you would be, could be.
My body tells me things, but I don’t listen. My heart, gut, mind. All have loud voices, loud enough that sometimes I wonder if someone close to me can hear them when they cry in chorus. But loud as they are how can they be a match for the muscle memory, for the craving to follow the same path over and over, for sugar and salt and steel and skin.
