My muscles are always screaming, and I need someone to put a stop to it. I’m not talking about any sort of physical pain, they’re just—on. All the time. Ready to move with no idea on how. Ready to leap across the stage, elegant in the mind but apprehensive in action. Nothing is in tandem with each other. No one is communicating.
I can hear my bones crack just fine; I’ve accepted that’s just how they’ll be. Spray some WD-40 on ‘em and they’ll be apples. The tension can ease on a good day and nothing else, so I’ve resorted to simply listening, homing in on the pain through this coarse, calloused skin. It used to just be whole body parts, scanning two legs at a time, then one leg, then the bottom half, then the individual muscles. I’ve gotten better at hearing what they have to say. My biceps want to inflate like balloons, my quads want to be squeezed and mushed like goo, my back muscles want to unlatch from ligaments and fold out into wings, retreat to some forgotten realm. I wish they were able to escape this granular prison I do not remember submitting to.
I’m not a scientist, nor do I know anything about the human body, but all that’s basically what they’re trying to tell me. I dropped Year 9 science in pursuit of legal studies or some else shit like that, to which I have also retained very little information. I remember these ads on Nickelodeon, factoids about whatever the intern working there found interesting that day and one time they said there are 270 bones inside a newborn child, which fuse together into a measly 206 once they fully develop. That’s about all the science I can withhold, but not without muddying the facts with an active imagination. As a kid, I assumed the bones disappeared. To where? I wasn’t sure, but there were theories. Fell into another dimension, collected by the Bone Fairy (older, cooler cousin of the Tooth Fairy), or maybe they just ran off. Found some new person to live in. Maybe a baby just consists of the excess bones from adults who don’t need those bones anymore, crawled up inside a woman’s tummy while the baby is growing. I had no idea, but I liked the idea that they went somewhere else, experienced something new. A motley crew of different shaped bones saddling up to the pub before heading their separate ways, some on their way to a different plane of reality, others on their way to a uterus.
I’m getting caught up on the bones thing. Sorry, I’ll move on.
I just like the idea that one can just up and leave. Not to escape their current situation, but to get out of their comfort zone, even if they’re still figuring out what that is. I mean, that’s the whole thing isn’t it. Do any of us really have a “comfort zone”? A place that is one hundred percent our own where we’re one hundred percent happy? In all the spaces we inhabit? And I don’t just mean the garage you’ve had to make a man-cave out of because your missus won’t have that fuck ugly jersey you’ve framed from your old footy club days be the centrepiece of the living room. I’m talking something more metaphysical. More spiritual, I suppose. I like the idea of picking out stardust, speckles of the universe, splaying it over the counter, having it ready to rearrange and refigure and reform whatever it is that’s out there you want to experiment with to make something new. Whether it’s in your life forever or not, it’s something you had the pleasure of being comfortable with, if only for a moment. The idea that things can change is important to me.
One day, I hope that I can change. I hope I’m changing now. To be the lady someone’s looked for.
Bea's Soapbox 