Second Body

Second Body

Nobody asked.

That's the first thing.
Nobody sent the memo,
nobody held the meeting,
nobody said:
we're going to make some changes,
here's what's staying,
here's what isn't,
sign here to confirm
you've been informed.

You woke up in the revision
already implemented.

---

Here is what they tell you:
the body is resilient.

Here is what they mean:
the body will continue
whether you've consented to the continuation
or not,
whether the version it's continuing into
is the version you recognize
or not,
whether you are ready
or not.

The body does not wait for ready.

The body is already there.

You are catching up.

---

The second body knows things
the first body didn't.

It knows the specific weight
of a scar
that is not heavy
and is not nothing.

It knows the new map,
the revised topography,
the place where the landscape changed
and healed into something
that is accurate
and unfamiliar
simultaneously,

the way a city looks
after construction,
still yours,
still the city you know,
and also
inexplicably,
quietly,
not.

---

You run your hands over the revision
the way you'd read a document
you didn't write
but have to sign anyway.

Clause by clause.

Ridge by altered ridge.

Looking for the original language
underneath the amendment,
the self that was here
before the body
made its unilateral decision
to become this.

The original language is there.

Mostly.

Enough.

---

What you grieve:

Not the body exactly.
Not the before-body,
not the body that moved through the world
without this knowledge,
without this particular
and permanent education
in what can change
without asking.

You grieve the not-knowing.

The specific, unretrievable innocence
of a self that had not yet learned
what the body is capable of doing
to itself,
for itself,
without you,
in the dark of the surgery
or the illness
or the transformation
you didn't see coming
until you were already
inside it,
already the second body,
already the after.

---

People look at you
and see the first body.

You are wearing the first body's face.
You are moving through the world
in the first body's approximate dimensions.
From a distance,
from the casual glance,
from the social register
that doesn't look closely enough
to see the amendment,

you are the same.

From the inside
you are the person
who knows the second body
is the one doing the work now.

The first body
is a memory
you are still
living in.

---

There is a grief
nobody names properly.

Not the grief of the diagnosis.
Not the grief of the procedure.
The grief of the after,
the quiet, ongoing, undramatic grief
of a person who survived
and is now required
to inhabit the survival,

to be grateful,
which you are,
to be fine,
which you mostly are,
to have moved on,
which you have,

while also being
the person who knows
the second body is not the first body
and never will be
and the world
doesn't have a form
for mourning
the self you were
before your own body
changed the subject.

---

Here is what the second body knows
that the first body couldn't:

How temporary the first body was
all along.

How the before
was always just
a before,
always pointing toward
an after it hadn't arrived at yet.

How the body was always
going to become
something else.

How this,
this specific and altered
and surviving and changed
and yours

was always
where it was going.

---

You did not choose this body.

You did not choose the first one either,
if we're being precise,
if we're following the logic
all the way back to the beginning
where none of it was chosen
and all of it was yours anyway.

The second body is yours.

The second body
with its new knowledge
and its amended topography
and its proof
of what survived
and what it cost

is yours.

---

Wear it.

Not as consolation.
Not as the brave face
the narrative requires
from people who have been
through the thing
and come out the other side.

Wear it as the body of a person
who has been changed
and is still here
and has learned,
from the evidence of the changing,

that still here
is not a small thing.

Still here
is the whole thing.

Still here
in the second body,
the revised body,
the body that did not ask permission
and did not wait for ready
and changed anyway

and carried you
through the changing

and brought you
here.

---

Nobody asked.

The body did it anyway.

That's what bodies do.

They survive the things
they survive
and they change in the surviving
and they hand you the changed self
and they say:

here.

This is what we have now.

This is what we are.

It's enough.

It has always been
enough.