Beethoven Could Not Write a Symphony as Perfect as Me

A Story by Andy

Prose. Assignment was reverence. I guess it's an essay, although it doesn't follow the whole never-use-you thing

The body has become such a shameful thing, we envelop it in an armor of 50% cotton and 50% polyester and hope that no one can see our stretch marks or get a glimpse of the hair we have not yet removed. We have nightmares of losing teeth or being seen in our underwear, or even worse, naked, and so we wake up with humid hair and dried spit on the corners of our mouths that leave a taste of the routine that we have been trying to escape. The edges of our eyelids are populated with remnants of what could have been and what was never said, and every morning we dutifully flick them away; a mechanic motion to make our faces look less grotesque and more graceful, to look like we are content with who we are.

A journey throughout the day reveals unwrapped bodies that are advertised as so magnificent that it’d be inconceivable to not showcase them to all the faces below gazing at the billboards with a sense of inferiority, because why is that body so perfect and why is mine such an awful thing to be imposed with? We suck it in and continue walking, listening to the comments of self hatred from everyone around us and believing that it is social norm to announce a bad thing about yourself at least once a day. And so I get home. I look at my arms, my thighs, my face, and my stomach. And I hate it. Fingernails dig into the extra fat that desperately grabs at the body I want to have, and at that moment the pain doesn't matter and the bruises are trophies that I will keep concealed yet another day under sweatshirts and layers of smiles and not-so-appropriate jokes. And when I go to bed the strings I want to pull are wrapped around my body, my regrets are coagulating and leaving shapeless flowers to bloom on my arms, and sleep dapples my vision, but never quite engulfs it.

And I hear it.

The blood moving through my ears, my unconscious breathing, and the mantra of my heart. My body speaks to me in ways unimaginable and I can almost swear I have reached nirvana. I gaze at my arms and find irregular galaxies made from explosions so catastrophic that my skin can't conceal them. We are the home of stars, asteroids, constellations, and suns that can keep planets alive and completely destroy others. We are a universe in which every inhabitant is working to keep us alive, they build dams to keep our blood from flooding and spilling our essence, they battle against invaders whose only purpose is to conquer and destroy what our body has worked so hard to achieve. They have no other purpose than to keep us going. There are countless processes happening all at once that just trying to picture them makes me dizzy like an inexperienced sailor in a sea full of the unknown.

And truly we are an ocean, a world of flowing rivers unseen and visible; while our blood rushes through canals under our skin, our hands have maps of places that only exist within us, and they are all so unlike from everyone else’s that, for a moment, I can’t believe that there are seven billion other vessels in the planet that are all so complex and so incredible because everyone is completely different and yet so similar. We are all made up of verses that link to become the poem that we are. Every breath, every aching muscle, every crack of our bones, and every beat our heart does or misses, these all create a eurythmy that follows the melody of the lives we are living. Why has this symphony, that not even Beethoven & Tchaikovsky could replicate, been pushed away into a corner that everyone looks away from, as if it were a homeless man asking for help?

The body is carefully put together in what seems to be such an easy way that no one stops and thinks: “I am amazing”. Because we are. Because, damn, stars are in no level as beautiful as our own personal little universes. Because our body loves us and will fight for us.

It’s time to fight back.

It’s time to love it back.