“I gave you up / for heart week: / it was that / or start to exercise / and I was tired / so tired.”
Heart week rolled around and I ignored the notification, rolled over in bed and kept the blinds down. Outside the sun was beating down, and I told myself that it was winter, ignoring my equatorial shift, the world was burning up in winter, a sure sign of the end times. I left the clock upside down to right my world. I brushed my teeth while in a handstand. I went back to sleep, and I woke up sweaty, four hours later, squinting my eyes although there was no light. I thought perhaps some future damage had already burned itself into my cornea, a tattoo of the pain to come.
Spirit week rolled around and I considered a traditional American tattoo. The tattoo would cover my scars, the lines bumpy and raised where I had bumped and raised up the skin, nurturing it like a newborn plant, a child. The tattoo artist told me the scars were too new, too young, to do anything about them, and my skin too black, it would be like seeking shade in the night. He offered to ink somewhere else but I told him no, thank you, that I already had enough ink on me to write a letter to my mother, fill the page front and back in a pattern of 1s and 0s that tried to tell her she was right, I did miss home.
Wellness week rolled around and I decided to lose weight. I sat at my desk 24/7, looking at pictures of myself from when I was 12. On a form that asked for my weight I was tempted to write down weightless, because it really had felt like that lately. Instead I filled in: 75 kg. Later they took my form and asked me to jump, and I jumped high enough that my knees cracked, but I did not fly, and when I hit the ground everything got knocked into place again, this time with more finality. They told me I had jumped so high that I must have left something behind, but inside I felt just as heavy. I gave up on weight loss. I found that I had nothing to lose.
My last week rolled around and I tried to pack my bags. I was tired, so tired, so I threw out all my belongings instead. I threw out my new family, old flings, soccer friends, really anything that would not fit in a 30 inch suitcase. I checked one bag, and they told me that was too heavy, too, so I left it on the tarmac where I watched it blow open in the turbulence of takeoff. I waited for my belongings to unravel in the wind but the bag was empty. I lost sight of it as we crossed the cordillera.
I flew home for the holidays. January was fast approaching. My New Year’s consolation: I had 52 weeks to start all over again.
[Kate Camp, “Heart Week,” from Realia]
this is going nowhere 