Tag: bodies

a minor procedure

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

she asks the ages of my children

(one day apart and six years

something to talk about while their fingers are inside me)

The funny thing is, I wasn’t actually sick when I let doctors make a hole in me and take something away. Minor surgery, of the sort on reality shows, and so I was awake for the procedure. Let me say, does surrealism ever make a heck of a lot more sense. Speaking with someone who’s in the midst of prying open your skin is a singular experience, and one that evokes more body horror than I like on a Monday morning.

And I’d just posted that poem On Convalescence, not considering the fact that I was about to experience it.  I was mainly thinking of an essay by Woolf, quoted in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose as an example of a perfectly valid run-on sentence.  Writing on illness, on its relative absence from the novels of her time despite all the ways that sickness and recovery impinge on our psychic and physical selves, Woolf’s rambling thoughts follow an indirect path ending at ourselves, the first and last locus of one’s consciousness, the very place where one experiences illness and convalescence.

I wasn’t sick. I was only on holiday (see below), but I have the work ethic of a consumptive viscount and a moral opposition to hustle culture, so I haven’t obliged myself to post much of anything in the last two weeks.  Add to that being still in a bit of a cocoon from my peculiar spring and from two years of you-know-what, and y’all going to have to bear with me.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 6: A pack of Chippendales playing cards

a muscular man's bare torso reflected in a shadowy mirror
~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

Not only because it was fifty-two images of nearly naked men, but because I stole it from my mother’s sock drawer and brought it to school to show my schoolmates.  If I could have only stayed that popular when I changed schools the following year…I might not be writing this sardonic internet commentary about the fleetingness of fame and my propensity for causing trouble.

I got away with it that time, and returned the cards to my mother’s drawer.  It’s so long ago, but there are faint memories of creeping into her room to revisit the cards.  Much of a muchness, fifty-two oiled torsos, numerous thighs, and in the centre of each, a satin or leather-clad implication of what men were really like.   

I knew so few men in those days. My parents had separated and my father lived overseas. My mother didn’t date and had a modest social circle, and so my interactions with adult men were limited to teachers.  Growing up, attraction and response were a muddle.  I was almost always surprised when someone kissed me. I almost always chose to kiss them back.  

There’s a specific absence in my upbringing.  When others were being warned off sex, being taught it was vile, evil, degrading, dangerous, I learned nothing.  This hasn’t harmed me over the long term, though I have made some spectacularly bad decisions.  People who learn to fear sex also make bad decisions, and hate themselves while doing so.  Between the two, I know what I’d choose.