This Is the Street Where My Body Lives

Associate Editor Blessing Christopher: This week’s miCRo adopts an unusual perspective to highlight how strategic positioning can influence narratives. Two different body parts are forced to exist against their natural placements—the head must do without the support of the body while the body must operate without the covering of the head. The narrator of the piece, the head, formerly in control due to its previous top-down position, now observes the world through an unfamiliar perspective. From the new bottom-up position, it becomes clear that a transfer of power had occurred during the split. In the end, we are shown not only the freedoms and constraints afforded by their new positions but also the role a narrator’s economic/social/physical placement can inform the power dynamics in a story.

This Is the Street Where My Body Lives

I’m a head with a buzz cut, rolling past, trying not to stall in the road on the way to my university astronomy class, when I’m compelled to stop and check on my body. She lives in the brick house with the blue door, my body, with her double-jointed arms and long, slender legs. I miss the swayback look of her, leaping and whirling, performing tango with that smooth bastard Raoul, or cold-plunging in icy tubs, surrounded by candles and bubbles, La traviata roaring overhead. I thought she’d be wandering lost, without me.

But look, there’s my body now! Opening the door naked, ripping open delivery boxes of leotards and fleece blankets on the porch, ready for drum circle in the front yard with hippies and yogis from fifty miles around. I’m idling like a lost volleyball, adjusting my glasses, eyes staring over the curb, watching my lithe body bop onto the grass and chest-hug that lucky tie-dyed drummer. She looks good, my body, toned and sunburned, her body hair now growing out everywhere. Headless, bumping and grooving with the other bodies, working up a sweat, oblivious to her own animal smells, ravenous for carbs but without a mouth to munch them, my body’ll be jonesing later for a hot shower and a massage. Oh, I miss the press of a big person’s oiled hands on my soft back.

She cartwheels roundly, limbs splayed like star points, and I’m blinking back tears. The full moon tells me I’m running late—my body kept my wristwatch in the divorce—for tonight’s astronomy lecture, scheduled to cover light bending and space-time fabric. But here at my old house, it’s a helluva night for my body, a crowd of bodies dancing and clapping, a bonfire blazing in the yard, my flushed figure leaping over it like a wild ballerina, flames licking her sturdy feet. All moist skin and energy, no common sense at all, once more she takes flight.