that was the year of several discoveries: first

and not least of which was that I *had* a body.
Before puberty I don’t remember much, far from fully,
but earlier in childhood it felt as if—as Merleau-Ponty
once lied—I *was* my body. What I mean is I felt no
meaningful division between us. Certainly, as a girl
I had early on learned to control large swathes of
my physical expression, to keep any gregariousness
or unruliness invisible, but this was a coordination,
a hide-and-seek with my forces working in absolute
concert to achieve discreet unknowable ends expected
of me by parents, teachers, the heavy sense of decorum
filtering in through the cigarette-stained sheers of
our front-room bay along with breeze and traffic-sound
I pretended ocean as I lay day-after-day in a thick
torpor. I’d no idea such exhaustion came from the game
of self-abnegation itself. Becoming imperceptible in-
side one’s own body was just how a girl was meant to
exist, so I tried. Other latchkey children, I have since
been told, watched hours of afternoon TV when home
alone, and this produced in them a sluggish state
that presented similarly to, but was not, my own. Un-
like me, they allowed ocular entrance to all animated
perversion and dopamine trigger. The onslaught of
rancid, florid media slowed the parts of their minds so
exquisitely primed at that age to make and do. But
that was not me ~ I learned ~ although I was later able to
mimic, I could never inhabit the core of other children.