BODY COUNT

Maybe I’ve only ever let people into me because of some immutable fear that all the ledgers would ultimately be tallied in the sky and I’d come up short.

This February 14th, I woke to count loaves in the dark. A few hours before dawn: two brioche, five sourdough, eighteen seeded ciabatta. The numbers invariably soothe me––bounded, discrete, telling truths of time and material. Three more raspberry kouign amann than yesterday. No rustic miche. Me, and my spreadsheet, and the bread to be sold, greet these mornings together. 

I tallied also: my twenty-first Valentine’s Day alone. 

Usually, nothing twists the knife of self-pity like this particular anniversary. The things I know to be true (for example: my worth is not written by having flowers in my vase––or someone in my bed––one day of the year) tend to slide away, and every abiding insecurity roars forth instead. Never is such a damning word. No one is such an easy diagnosis.

This year felt different. I’m a person not unacquainted with recovery, and step four has always been a favorite. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. While taking stock, I walked through another, different repository. 

One boy. A few years too late, you are kissed for the first real time. He leads you out onto someone else’s roof while your friends watch. He doesn’t remember the next day.

One boy. A year older, the captain of the soccer team, funny. You mistake your attraction to public affirmation for attraction to him. You spend a few months searching out empty rooms at parties instead of dancing with your friends. Once, a senior girl sees you come downstairs alone, the horror of your inaugural blow job apparently written on your face, and wordlessly hands you a glass of water. You break up with him and stop getting invited.

One boy. An awful kisser. He leaves behind one sock and a bad taste in your mouth.

One girl. An artist. Quiet and discerning, kinder than you. The first time, she asks: do you want to do this? You do. Holding her hand feels illicit and good. By the end of things, you get too drunk too many times. She doesn’t forgive you. 

One girl. Both of you are on your period: lunar fallacy.

One boy. Tall, and looks at you like a favorite secret. Each time he hands you a detail of himself it feels like a small miracle. You keep them all. You learn that you care most to be called funny––the rest is for the birds. Being with him is oddly simple, and you wonder if everyone else has been fitting this easily all along. You willfully ignore the accumulating evidence of mismatched desire. When he ends things, sitting in your chair, at your desk, you cry. Months later, you discover that he plagiarized his non-breakup breakup speech from an indie rom-com. It makes you feel better. 

One boy. You would rather forget. Every once in a while, even now, what you do remember returns to settle on you like crows, soundless and heavy.

One girl. You are dancing, and wearing short dresses, and sweetly blurry of your perimeters. You like her hair and the things she posts on Instagram. At a coffee date a week later, lines are muddled again, this time between romantic and platonic. You haven’t yet arrived at an answer.

One boy. He pays for your coffee, and then your pad Thai. It smells vaguely of bribery, but you don’t mind. In the clumsy pre-sex standoff in his room, he shows you his posters and then makes you choose a vinyl record to make out to. Evidently, you choose wrong. Even so, it is nice to be courted, to hold someone’s hand on the shuttle ride home. You spend your last night before lockdown with him, too sad to be touched.

Any one could be the thread I carry through the years, the story worth telling, an axis to define my orbits. But, truthfully, no spectres haunt me––they’ve simply become notches on the headboard, or data to teach me lessons I seemingly refuse to learn. Maybe that was what I was after all along. Maybe I’ve only ever let people into me because of some immutable fear that all the ledgers would ultimately be tallied in the sky and I’d come up short. Undesirable, by virtue of not enough evidence to the contrary. How simple and conclusive, to confirm the worst theories I keep in the self-loathing box under the sink. After all, what could be more telling of my inadequacy, my fundamental unloveablity, than a short roster of lovers? Than a blank one? Somewhere down the line, I must have decided I was little more than a register of my romantic and sexual encounters––or, more terrifyingly, the empty spaces in between. I don’t know what that says about me; I don’t know if I’d like it much. 

But I delight in my quiet act of record-keeping. I love the smell of flour on me and the gentle labors opening the bakery asks of my body. I love doing needful, unsung things before anyone is awake to know the difference. And the philosophy bleeds. Or maybe I’ve always had an appetite for inventory; I realize I’ve tracked most everything, just for the uncanny pleasure of it. Books I’ve read, recipes I’ve practiced, places I’ve visited and plan to see again. Friends kept and friends lost. Mistakes. Why not lovers? 

After my inventory was complete, I arranged the display. I chose a home for each piece; I prefer the five-grain loaves together and stacking the tarts just so. In this way, I have a quiet power over my past as well––I get to place the stories where I will, telling them slant or true. Carrying them forward with me. Or, maybe, not at all.

AUTHOR: Sophie Weber is setting the record straight.
ARTIST: Shelby Kostal