the bargain
I will believe in God again if I can get my body back. So I can touch it. So I can run my fingers down and over the slight teeny swell of my belly that I once found so hideous. So that I can photograph it in every stage of dress and undress so I can see it over and over and over again and bring it to my lips kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss. So I can run again. So I can stand in the sun again and cast a slender shadow flower-like and pristine. I want my pre-baby body back, its unlined breasts, its flat flat flat flatness a great unexplored land I will believe in God again if I can hold my body close to myself, if I can pet it, and rock it, and push it around in the baby carriage if I can feed it bits of oranges and loads of cherries.
I will forgive God if he will give my once-perfect body back. The body without the rheumy effects of age the body without gravity gravity gravity pulling and pulling, without the aches, without the naked light in its eyes boring tiny white holes into its brain I will pray to God again if he will wrap me in swaddling clothes, if he will pull me sopping wet from my mother and lay me atop his chest, if he will double me on his bicycle, if he will lift me up to the very top of the church ceiling so that I’m more like a tree than a girl, so that I am full of colored lights and tinsel, full of glow-in-the-dark stars, and endless orange points of light.
If only God will hasten to fashion me into a person so perfect, so in control, so disciplined, so utterly beyond the reach of disease and decay, then I will hit my knees in the morning and say the little prayers my mother taught me, I will kneel before the cross, I will genuflect. I will drink the blood and eat the body, I will witness of Christ’s mercy continuously throughout my days, I will marry the Lord and cleave only unto him if only God will preserve me in aspic, in amber, in a glass coffin in the forest and let me sleep there until the time on earth is up and then I and I alone will skip my perfect ageless effortless boundless body along the girders and lintels of the universe—without a falter, without a net, without a care.
