Heavy...

Heavy is me. I sit rounded and catch a glimpse of my self in a shop window or a mirror in a store. I am fat. Not just fat but huge. My head looks small. That is not how I see myself and so I am often taken by surprise by this image. Then a few hours later, probably after I have been mulling that image in my mind over and over again I come to the conclusion that I will never win this battle. I will never ever be that girl again. Then I begin to wonder when it all began. Yes I know, the grandmother story but later on in life I lost the weight and now it comes back again. It was gone when I married Hüseyin 21 years ago. It was gone 23 years ago when we met. It came back when the babies died. It came back with all the needles I had to suffer and the loss. Then it came back with the fear of an earthquake as I grew to make myself strong enough to withstand one. It came back and stayed and now I am one of the fat ones. Will I ever be thin again...well one can't lose faith but mine is surely dwindling down.

Letting Go...

So much to let go of. I remember a moment when everything disappeared and there was nothing and everything all at the same time. I remember the lightness of it and the way everything that is heavy fell back into space when I took a deep breath and tried to 'understand' what was happening. Let go. Let go of understanding. Don't understand anything because really you can't. I know this but I have spent so long in my brain that my body is neglected. I have stuffed all the things that the mind has said are not healthy or good for us to think about into the rest of my body that I am like a house with one clean room only. All the other rooms have been neglected. And my brain sabotages quite well. "Go ahead eat that..." it says. "You only live once! Enjoy life!" I hear it say as I reach for the peanut butter and spread it on a piece of toast at 2 a.m. "Drink!" it says. That is does when it gets tired. Drinking slows it down, helps it lose control for a while and the body suffers. Lately though with 50 years behind it the body seems to be fighting back. After drinking nothing happens to my body. It is in the morning after when I wake up that my mind is foggy and heavy. So the mind steps in and says "no more drinking." I haven't in a while. Yes letting go. I need to let go of the body and of the mind, to exist in that space that is everything and nothing at the same time. Maybe if I can sit in complete silence for a while it will work.

Reflection: I saw my head separate from my body. My head was clean, bright and busy. My body was a wasteland, filled with all the feelings, the food, the junk that the mind doesn't have a need to work through. Maybe the mind doesn't have the capability to work through that. In the beginning of the writing I talk about that moment when everything disappeared. It was at a time when I was just sitting doing nothing. It will take time but I see clearly that I must find a space and a time to do that. I may not be able to do that at home at first but I could go to the yoga place down the street. 

The Dance

“Just listen to the music and release your body. Let it flow...move as it wants to.” A small, thin ballerina is giving us dance lessons. We must first get acquainted with our bodies. I cannot move. The music increases, expecting, demanding, excited, filling the room and attacking me. I shut down my body… I must leave the music out. I am angry and I want to leave, run away from here but I cannot move.  “I can’t move, I’m stuck” I say, lowering my voice hoping to hide the panic that is rising within. “Don’t worry. Just close your eyes…relax,” says the ballerina.  When my eyes close,my body screams. Uncomfortable, disoriented, I swim in shame.  The music is attacking me on all sides, searching for a way in…I am 40 and I shut down all entrances years ago.

“Fatty Fatty two by four, couldn’t get through the bathroom door…” The sounds of children I knew many years ago, the voices of children I wish I had never known rise and fill the space around me, laughing in the increasing heat of the music. I want to relax, to open up my body, to think of happy things, good things but a little girl stares at me. The little girl I once was, standing infront of the Trevi Fountain in Rome. A girl from photographs locked in my memories - Her breast just sprouting, the barely visible colors of a woman painted lightly on her body…a blue polyester dress, small earings on freshly pierced ears and a frozen smile on her face. The only memory from this day my mother bought my first bikini, are the large hands of a sales woman, grabbing my breasts and screaming “bambina!” in delight. Her laughter joins the laughter of the children and fills the music. Other women, other laughters and other hands, join them, each leaving their shame on my body, locking down all the doors.

“Relax, just allow yourself to loosen up” The balerina’s voice seems distant now…hot, it is very hot here. I’m sweating. A drop of sweat rolls down my back and comes to rest at the bottom of my spine. I want to wipe it away but I cannot move.  Hot African days fill the room now. Blue and white striped school uniforms wrap my body. “Killing me Softly” plays somewhere in a darkened room where young bodies lock into one another…and boys want to kiss my sister. The boy I kissed on a dare smiles at me…I don’t remember his name…I thought he loved me.  My shame like a blanket wraps around me. Was I always looking at the men who wanted my sister or was it her thin body I couldn’t take my eyes off of…I just don’t know. I’m walking in an African market and young black men reach out to touch my hair… “my wife! My wife!” they call out to me… it is very hot. I want to go.

“Get up, go…move around the room, walk around if you want to.” I try but I can’t move. To go….far far away…to go back to the years when I loved my body…those short few years…clean, ironed white shirts, black pants and a black apron. The years when I waited on tables. I remember standing on my feet for 14 hours, remember running from the kitchen to the tables and remember my knees I couldn’t bend when I finally got home. I remember the pain when I finally bent my knees and the pain when I tried to open them again and I remember my thin body. I had pushed it those years… and could feel its every move. I liked when it ached… it was alive then.  There were bars, discos and dancing in those years… my body would flow freely… dans on top of bars… paint itself. It had lovers that looked at it with desire.  Suddenly I remember the salads, the diets and the growing fear within me, fear that one day this body would not belong to me, that it would leave me. A drunken stupor falls over my memories.

“I won’t look like them will I?” I had asked my sister one day as we waited at the Izmir airport.  Fat women surrounded us.  I had decided to live in Turkey. “You? Never!” my sister had replied and we had laughed. 17 years, a thin body, a fat body, blonde hair, black hair, straight hair, curly hair, long hair and short hair have passed over that day. I am sitting in a disco in Ankara. My hair is bleach blonde, my dress a blood red, wraps tightly around my body. Sitting in this corner, I look at the people looking at me. There are lovers and there are those who can’t take their eyes off me, men and women who turn to look at me when I enter a room… look at me… because my hair is blonde and my body is thin.

“Don’t fight it. Release yourself into the music.” But I always fought it...always fought with this body of mine. It didn’t do all the things I wanted it to...I said lose the weight...it lost babies.  Was it that hard to make a child...it just didn’t listen, didn’t want to. It threw them out. I stuffed it with injections, medicines, wanted to train it and then I thought I had won...it gave me Yusuf. Then I didn’t need it anymore. And like a snake slithering out of it’s skin, I left it in my past and chose a life without it. I called what remained, what I had left a victory.  Never did I realize that in the years that followed, I stuffed the emptiness left behind with my fears, disappointments, my anger and shame that wouldn’t go away.

The music changes, slows down, grows lighter. It is as if one of those people who look at everything in a positive light, those people who aren’t true to themselves has just entered the room, ready to trick me. I grow tired of sitting and get up...pretend to be happier. I see Süreyya, my first bale teacher in elementary school. I remember her long blond hair, her thin body and how I never wanted to leave her side. “Let your fingers dance across your face” says the thin ballerina. They search, and search, my fingers grope for a door to enter. So many years have passed I’m not sure we’ll find one. I turn to look at my body, discarded, abandoned, pick it up, dust it off and wear it once more. There is still so much work to be done inside.