Personal Essay by Rafael Andres Jennings
Ever since I arrived in adulthood, I’ve come to see that the body and mind are more aligned than I had initially thought. I have found that at my most helpless, my mind arrests its own power. At the pit of my soul, where my emotions become acquainted with my obsessions and my fears unveil my desires, there is my body, taking the punches for all that my mind cannot deflect.
Do you remember the first time you rode a bike? Mine was down a steep hill at the end of my street. The houses whipped past my face, blurring against the wind. In the moment suspended above the drop, my feet on the pedals, I saw the steep decline ahead of me. I kept pedaling. As gravity took hold, the mechanics of the bike spun rapidly, my feet with them. In movies, you can see a fall in slow motion, one movement. But I remember this fall as a sequence of breaths, one sharp inhale at the height of the drop, and then the series of short breaths that came to me as I lay on the street. Little puffs of summer air brought pain back into my body. That day, I was introduced to a storm of pain that my body had been preparing for.
Have you ever woken up with your throat burning from last night’s smoke? You try to swallow, but the sting cuts through your spinning thoughts. The sun outside the window heats the glass, which heats the white duvet, which heats your body underneath it. The raw flesh you feel in your dry throat right after you swallow keeps your senses alive. Wake up. Make the bed and soften the pain with your first sip of water. The smoke heats you from the inside out, cooking little pimples on your skin. You will smoke again, to watch a still room spin, to let the flame become a memory. The enticement of déjà vu lights your throat again, and you come home to a reality that has never existed.
The stomach grumbles at the worst times. I pull the zipper on my jacket to muffle the sound in the back of a classroom, but the truth is that nothing silences it like a full meal. Not an energy drink, not a latte, not a protein bar. You climb deeper into promise than you ever ventured into truth. You wake and find a mirror; you fall asleep with two fingers pinching your protruding stomach. And you deny nature and let yourself starve. You think beauty is something that encases you, but it is something that you wait to feel. You watch the nature channel and see lions in the desert swallow the gazelle meat from their teeth to feel like kings. It’s the nature you can see and feel that is held outside of a mind like your own. To you, to be king is to sacrifice everything. So, you close your eyes and tell your mind to find the reward in the pain. Eventually, the pain registers as the reward.
You’ve watched it all fail: the yelling, the shaking, the crying, the worrying, so you open yourself up in a way you’ve never had to before. A last resort. Take off your pants, your shirt, and everything underneath. Take off your glasses and your sight is more raw. You have a lot to offer when you arch your back, point your toes, and suck in your stomach. Eye contact is too hard; close your eyes. Let it happen and then push for it. After, pee presses against your bladder, wanting to release. But you lie naked, watching the color slowly return to the dark room. You look next to you, and the other person is asleep. Eventually, you fall asleep too, letting the body find the mind outside this realm. And maybe, when you’ve washed off unfamiliar sweat from your body, you will ask, “For whose body? And for you, whose mind?” I won’t try to convince you that sex is beyond a primitive act of release. But once the arguing is done, the promises are broken, and the ties severed, you are free to let the face fade from the sensation. But if you’re like me, you still may choke at the question, “Have you ever been in love?”
The body experiences loneliness to a greater degree than the mind. The mind can be deluded into feeling like someone else’s. But the body does not borrow. It doesn’t yearn for connection because it functions perfectly alone. You forfeit the delicateness of your body’s independence to pretend that two hearts belong to the same chamber. You enjoy disorientation so much that you live your days in confusion. And every time, your body fights its way back to a state it might not have ever obtained in the first place. Running on software that the mind has not even installed.
Your body has a way of knowing that the good feelings cannot last forever. Your stomach churns food and flushes the colon for your next meal. Your mind falls asleep, and without realizing it, your brain distracts you by spinning new movies from the past. You sip to feel social, smoke to feel chill, and have sex to feel loved. And in your actions, you fight against your body, pushing it to perform the hard, sobering, languorous job that is bringing you back to reality.
One day, you will wake up with sheets drowned in blood, or ulcers in your stomach, or a black eye against your pillow. Your eyelids shudder at marks so physical and at pain you can no longer ignore. The sight of blood and bruises makes you nauseous. You close your eyes and pray to God. Through the ramblings, he hears the song of your body, begging to be returned to a sympathetic mind. I have been told that balance is rooted in moderation. Yet I wonder who is there to moderate my thoughts. If you change how you think through thinking, does the oppression of thought ever end? I have learned that I cannot save my body from my mind, not if I must be the attorney for both. Jealousy can rage through me, sadness can consume me, and happiness elate me, but when that ends, my body will lead me back to sleep and take over, every time.