On Wednesdays, you pull on a neon sports bra and leggings to see your personal trainer, Paul. For one hour, Paul invites you to reimagine your body—to see it as not a body, but a machine. Together you track calories, correct the imbalances in your limbs, work on building muscle mass, and soon your physiological vocabulary evolves into an intimate repository for movement, shape, and manipulation. You learn to trust the stillness of walls and floors, the precision of their proportions. Your relationship to pain changes. Between reps you lie on the gym mat, feeling your weight roll out like a wave across the sticky vinyl, isolating the heavy breathing of men around you, their shadows a reminder that you will always glow pink. After each session you return home and fall onto your couch, burrowing into its soft center, trying to get your body stuck. You crave an impression—want to feel your life like a pulse that will never stop.
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Once, you misread the title of an Elizabeth Bishop poem— “Falling Stallion” instead of “Filling Station”—and you haven’t been able to forget that falling stallion since.
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You do dead bugs. Paul crouches next to you with his palm across your belly like he’s ready to conduct a séance. You wonder if he can feel the ghosts inside you, can excise them from the home they’ve built in the cave of your pelvis. You hold your core steady, driving its tight cluster of muscle into the mat, trying to emulate a petrified dead thing.
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Freshman summer of high school, you exercised every day in your living room, cutting your diet down to Special K for three months. You lost five pounds and weighed below a hundred by August and you thought that was beautiful. Years later and twenty pounds heavier, you watch as the sharp points of your hipbones jut into the air, carving you out of the dark as your partner coils his body around yours and you have to look away because there is no light.
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You do push-ups and planks. Paul rests his hand on the fold where your spine forms a narrow bayou along your back. You imagine his palm pressing through the skin, reaching into the wetness of your insides, curious about what he might find. Before this all started, you remember the look on Paul’s face at your consultation and you wonder if that was the moment he knew he couldn’t help you. Your body breaks and you fall.
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You need to eat more, your mother says in her closet as you finger her blouses. When you refuse the ones she’s tried to force you to take, you ask her to make you a grilled cheese instead. She sits and watches you eat until the sandwich disappears and you remember the day just the other week when you sobbed in your bathtub as you tried to stuff a turkey sandwich down your throat. You held your mouth open but kept crying, the bread going soggy in your palm, your communion taken in vein because of course you were always the body and the blood. Your crying became laughter as you balled up a piece of crust, tossed it into your mouth, and thought, I, too, can be a filling station.
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The next time you see Paul, it’s time to check your progress. You stand barefoot on the body scanner with your arms outstretched as it reads the softest parts of you—your organs and tissue a collection of gray matter, your heart lost in the crosshatch of vein and rib bone—and you finally see yourself for the first time. But besides bone, most of you is missing because your body has always been a ruin.
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Today the apricots blushed against the glass bowl at the center of your kitchen, but you did not touch them. You try to think back to the beginning, when it started, but you can’t remember. Creation, after all, was always a myth.
