My body wasn't made for being loved, that I well know.
My mother knew it too, very early on when I started to be an object of display, she didn't hesitate to tell me: "I've got a bad back", and I always go back to that moment, when I was walking down our street with Nadjet, the neighbour my age, and I felt my mother's gaze behind me on the ugly balcony which was half covered with hand-washed shirts and half uncovered, as if to be dramatically unaesthetic.
This feeling of being watched and judged ran very deep and still lingers today.
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The silent voice - Gerald Edward Moira
My body has been used and misused. I've always carried burdens, emotional gallons and water stripes. There has never been enough water, never enough love, where I come from and where I keep heading back to. It's on my back, written in the curves of misery, carrying burdens or becoming one.
My mother says I was due for an abortion, me and my back, my wicked back. But I was fortunate enough to survive the freaky herbal potions that were destined to accomplish it, and which were about as scientifically credible as my self-esteem of today, smelling strong but hardly working.
My back is both bent and stiff, so while aware of its bad state, it doesn't try to change, in fact it does the opposite, remaining stiff while being wrong, to make change even more inconvenient. And that's how I carry my body, as I carry myself, unevenly but firmly, persuaded that my vulnerability only attracts malevolence, till I can think of no alternative. This vulnerability as drawn into my spine, both of which subject to my dictatorship, it is I who decide how they show themselves to the detriment of their own sanity, until they crack, or I do.
But the cursed body must first be mended, the curse unlearned before learning sane verses. Verses that aren't of the half-covered balcony, not of the blue and green basins that empty in the blink of an eye and fill up in an eternity, not of the aggression accumulated, interiorised and redirected towards all the ugly balconies in the world, towards all the lack of water and love, not any verses that I know of.
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