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At night, I practice dissolving…The process feels how a time-lapse video of a decaying log looks. Like sugar melting into hot water or a patch of sand swallowed by the hungry tide. 

When I was first learning how to do this, my body fought it. It would jump me awake into a startled state, like when you're falling asleep in class. The fear would swell — I'm dying! — and then subside — you're surrendering. I practiced trusting the let go, assuring myself that nothing can harm me. And like anything practiced enough, I started to do it with more ease. 

I didn't use to be able to do this. I used to feel the denseness of my form against whatever was supporting it: a mattress, a yoga mat, a well-intended shoulder or chest. Like the princess from the Princess and the Pea, I could feel every spring in a spring mattress, every rib in a rib cage, every scratchy tag against soft skin. When I was small, my mother tells me, I couldn't stand how the seams of socks felt against my toes. 

Over time, I learned to mute these sensations. I tuned out my body to get along in the world, sheathing it in layers of tension, like armor. My brain commanding it with the rigidity of a drill sergeant. And it submitted, quieting its innate wisdom. 

I became so disconnected from my body that I began to relate to it as an enemy that was out to get me. I was paranoid at every turn that it would turn on me and take me down. It was like living with a sniper. So I’d sleep with one eye open, staring at a concerning-looking mole, or a rash growing inside the crook of my arm, or suspicious internal gurgles and creaks. (It didn't help that I worked at a health information site for a decade.)

I had an endoscopy at 23 (no celiac disease detected), a CT scan at 27 (no abdominal abscess), a mammogram at 31 (no breast cancer). Still, I was convinced it was only a matter of time.

When I felt a persistent pain in my lower back while I was pregnant, my worry meter just about short-circuited from overload. My midwife was reassuring, especially after clean urine samples, but as the pain persisted, so did I. I knew this time, something was wrong. 

Eventually, an ultrasound was ordered to check my kidneys. It found that they were healthy, but one of my daughter's kidneys was missing. It found three cysts on her brain and a hole in her heart. It found that her body was ‘incompatible with life.’ 

I used to fear that I wouldn't be able to get pregnant. That my body would fail me if I tried. I no longer have that fear. I no longer see my body as my enemy; I see it as an arbitrary boundary, like state lines, as a vessel for something much vaster than it can contain.

So I dissolve.

I feel the electricity of my aliveness pulsing through my veins and ligaments, bones, and muscles. Then I allow it to overtake my form until I can't feel my hands folded across my chest. Until I am beyond the artifice of arms and legs and head and heart, and the soup of blood and guts sloshing around inside of me. Until I am floating in a universe-sized vat of warmth and nothingness and everythingness.

Our bodies and the earth that holds them exist so that we can experience contrast and constraint, pleasure alongside pain. So we can realize how good we have it when we finally dissolve back into our natural state, returning to what we all are — what we were all along.

No body, just love.

Credits

Accompanying music: Green Arrow by Yo La Tengo

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