meaghano:

I cut this out of a magazine when I was 12 or so and it has come with me to Florida for high school, to Indiana for college, and now to New York for…livin’. It keeps falling off of the wall over my desk, proclaiming either futility or urgency.

Out of that same magazine, I tore an ad, I am no long sure for what, that was this drawing of legs that had, “THIGHS, thighs! Oh, the worries of thighs…” scrawled artfully around it.  It looked very romantic.

It seems very terrible now to think that I was worried about my thighs when I was 12, but terrible or no, every night I’d lie in bed and stare at the side of my desk where I had scotch taped things like this ad, hanging right next to the liner notes from my Lilith Fair cd and a rebus I had made of the lyrics to Gangsta’s paradise. My breathing would deepen before I thought about all the boys I was excited to see at school the next day, thought of all the things I wanted and the things I thought I may never get to do, reviewed my sorrow for all of the types of girls I would never be, weighed how much being who I really am both limited and freed me, even, especially, then. I considered my thighs. I worried about them; for them. Who would love me when I had these dark circles under my eyes and my mother told me I was too young for makeup and hadn’t she given me these thighs anyways? Did she not doom us both to a life of fighting to be loved that the girls whose thighs did not touch when they stood upright found free-flowing and abundant? I wanted repayment in lipstick and concealer and t-shirts from The Gap to wear on no-uniform days. I wanted a chance.

I remember very distinctly when I stopped worrying. Like so many moments of intuitive validity, it began with copying part of an ee cummings poem into my diary (I imagine my printer was out of ink, like it is now, for being out of ink is my perpetual state of being. Printers! Oh, the worries of printers!):

breasts will be breasts and thighs will be thighs
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
-time is a tree (this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough

(motherfucker).