autobiography of a corpse

a memoir told through the lens of a body

la mort d’ophélie - eugène delacroix

There’s more than one way to abandon a body.

You are ten and standing outside on the balcony. You watch your body fall, watch it slowly collapse into the pavement below. It looks so small from above, finally an imitation of how it has felt to live inside of it. Time moves in even spaces; there’s a pool of blood around it before you could even see it grow. Your mom calls you in for dinner, but whatever takes your seat at the table feels hollow.

After dinner, you go outside and watch the bugs crawl over your body. You’ve never felt much connection to it, anyway, so the sight doesn’t bother you. You watch it gnaw away at your stomach, watch as what used to be you - or at least some representation of you - shrinks. You wonder if your mother would finally be happy now seeing your body in this size. You wonder if you can even call this body “abandoned” if it was never really yours to begin with.

For the rest of the year, whenever your mother makes slight remarks on the space you take up, you think back to that body on the pavement. You had stayed outside watching until the ants had consumed everything. You wonder if your mother would say the same remarks about the blood that remained. You imagine her voice in your head - “aiya, can’t fit into any good clothes.” Imagining her saying that about a pool of blood makes you laugh. You imagine yourself as the pool of blood.

There is more than one way to abandon a body.

You are fifteen and he wants something from you. You are fifteen and you are desperate to be useful - desperate enough that it’s easy to mistake useful and used. A small voice in your head is screaming, but you’ve long since learned that your voice is secondary.

So you let him wear you down. You let him take what he wants. You are not a fighter and so you let your body go peacefully. There is no blood, there are no bugs, it does not shrink piece by piece into nothingness. There is no sound this time, either, just a silence that vibrates in your skull. The body is still. You watch it fade into nothing.

There is more than one way to abandon a body.

You are twenty and you can confidently say that you have been touched by something divine. You’ve had a smattering of bad relationships, simple relationships, but there has never been anything quite like this one. Even love feels too small a word to contain how you feel; you could swear you can feel the entire universe coursing through your veins. Have you ever felt so big in your life? How did you never know how good it felt to fill a room?

But then he leaves.

He leaves and he takes what you had thought was you with him. He leaves and suddenly you are small again. He leaves and suddenly you are smaller than the corpse whittled away by ants. He leaves and you are smaller than the body crushed into a corner, hiding from sight. He leaves and you are smaller than the body that felt like nothing. He leaves and you are smaller than nothing.

This time it feels like your body has abandoned you.

Three months down the line and you can’t look in mirrors anymore. There is a hole you cannot see and to conceal it, you’ve eaten it away until you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror. Eat, sleep, repeat. Eat, sleep, repeat. Eat, sleep, repeat until your body isn’t yours anymore, until your body has abandoned you, until you can feel your cells collapse in on themselves.

God does not grant free favors and so you build yourself a new body out of the old flesh. God does not grant free favors and so you, who has never learned how to build a body, find yourself scraping it together off the instructions of those who stole it in the first place. When you look in the mirror, the body is still not yours, even though there is no one left to steal what remains.

You don’t believe in God, but you pray anyways. Please give me my body back, you ask him, late at night, your back on the floor and your fingers so intertwined they turn white. I want my body back, you repeat over and over again, but in the echo of your despair you could hear the truth of it. Which body? The silence of your apartment lets the thought bounce about freely. What body did you ever even have to miss it now?

There is an echo in the refrain: this abandoned body has never left. There is an echo in your grief: this abandoned body is still yours.

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