Silent - Melissa Nunez
CW: negative body image/body dysmorphia; imagery referencing abuse
I don’t know if it was due to nature or to nurture that I have always labelled myself errant. Did I learn that I was displeasing, or did I just feel it in my bones? Was it a voice of someone other, or was it my own? Maybe it was their voices, my parents’, inside of me rejecting each other already. Nothing about me was all him or all her. Each part a perfect mix of two-become-one in my form. It seems as if these parts of me were destined never to be at peace. I imagine their divorce a war within my body, the DNA attempting to splice and rewrite itself as each its own.
As long as I can remember, I have wanted there to be less of me. So much so I once even believed I wished it true. I know what it is to be of no consequence. To observe things unnoticed— camouflaged behind the label of teacher’s (overweight) mouse. For all intents and purposes, I was a normal pre-adolescent, but words gummed up inside the crevice of my palate the way the extra flesh of my upper arm churned my antiperspirant into paste, glommed the sticky balls of my linty odor to the grooves. My dreams and desires remained hidden behind pockets, like my too-large thighs in wide-leg jeans. Unwanted as the extra fold on Valerie T’s stomach when she sat down. “See,” she would tell the class, pinching the sliver of skin between slender pointer and thumb.
“See how disgusting this is?”
The closest I ever came to my first crush was when he mistook my leg for half a cafeteria seat one afternoon assembly. I was too stunned by the intimacy and then too embarrassed by the seconds that had already passed to utter a word. I imagined my knee a semi-circle, my thigh as warm as my cheeks. My body backdrop furniture in the unlit room as the people not beneath him preened and bantered through the entire assembly, and not a single soul discovered the error.
“Really?”
You leave the room because I chew watermelon too loudly in bed even though your face was still illuminated by the light of your cellphone. Later you said it wasn’t really about the crunching, you were already on edge. Irritated like when you reach your hand over to halt the reflexive snipping of my teeth against the uneven edges of my nails when I am unsettled but have yet to realize why. “Don’t make that noise.” You have no patience for discussions when my words don’t match your predetermined script. There’s no agree to disagree with you. And so, I can’t help but feel like the emissions from my mouth are unwelcome, and maybe I should shove them back in, seeds and all, so you never have to be offended by their sound.
Now I am afraid I will become as silent as a pillar. I can’t make my mouth fit yours. You say my life experience warps my world view. I claim an open mind when I only ever walk the soles of victims—illogical, a flaw. You say it like it is salt in the batter. The aromatic left in the oil too long, and now all you taste is the bitterness. You say it like it should be so easy to peel these hands from my throat, these fingers from my mouth, silence the voice in my ear. You say it like I haven’t felt taller for the first time in years, walked around this house and realized I am no longer a child seeking permission to exist. You say it like a diagnosis, a cancer of the vision, of perception.
If I don’t collect these words. Plant the seeds on pages and watch them grow. Prune them—weed out what doesn’t belong. If I don’t tend to my own garden of groaning where I decide. The thing that keeps me hoping, breathing, moving. Alive.
First published in MINERVA RISING Issue 21: Winter 2022 The Creative Self
Melissa Nunez lives and creates in the caffeinated spaces between awake and dreaming. She makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where she enjoys observing, exploring, and photographing the local wild with her homeschooling family. She writes an anime column at The Daily Drunk Mag and is a prose reader for Moss Puppy Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her work here and follow her on Twitter: @MelissaKNunez.
