I Don’t Mind by Josie Levin

I get tired of my body. I start to send it outside. I start to send it outside without me. One night it goes out and doesn’t come back. It’s raining, the persistent kind of rain that carries over the hours, lightening but never stopping. I get worried. I scramble for what to do without hair to pull, skin to pinch, scabs to pick.

I call my mother but she just asks me where I left it.

“But I didn’t,” I tell her. “I didn’t leave it. It left me.”

She doesn’t get it. “It’s your body, your responsibility,” she says. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Nothing” I say and want to hang up but have no body with which to do so.

She talks for another ten minutes. The house has sold just in time. This rain has gotten into the basement. Now it is someone else’s problem. I don’t tell her that my body is sick. That it left me sick. In the rain. She’s right after all: what do I want her to say?

She has to hang up first.

I order in. Nothing fancy but I can’t think until I eat something and preparing anything without my body is unnerving and alien. But eating is difficult, too.

The body was so shockingly involved, biting, chewing, tasting, swallowing. Without sensation, eating loses what little satisfaction it still had. I manage half of my sandwich but don’t think of a way to draw my body back.

It's easier to get high, which I appreciate. Without lungs, I don’t even cough.

I do some online shopping. Put cold medicine, a fleece blanket, and a pair of fuzzy socks in my cart on a home goods website I have a gift card for, but hesitate to check out. What if my body comes back completely fine? What if it got over its sickness, having run off like a dog to gag in private and plans to return to me only when completely healed? I would hate to waste money when my body could walk back in at any moment.

I look to the door for a minute, suddenly nervous.

It seems further away than it used to be. Without my body the apartment is much more spacious. More than its wide frame would allow. It’s hard to motivate myself. There are dishes in the sink. They need soap and a steady stream of warm water.

I organize the clothes my body would wear if it was here. I have begun rolling everything, methodically. Compared to cooking, it is a very easy thing. Perhaps it does the opposite of cooking, not invoke the body, but banish it. I don’t remember what it left in and I can’t picture my body as anything but naked, shivering in the bathroom mirror.

Out of the window I think I see it walking across the skyline but I can’t tell if it’s getting closer or further away.

I try to wave but have no hand.

It waves for me.

END

Josie Levin

Josie Levin (he/they) is a visual artist and writer whose work appears in a variety publications, including Scarlet, carte blanche, and Mud Season Review and was shortlisted for the 2023 Penrose Poetry Prize. Josie is currently a Poet-In-Residence at The Chicago Poetry Center. Instagram: @bemusual