Today, we’re excited to share the fourth and final winner from our September Selects series: “You Body” by Rosalind Goldsmith, in the category of Second Person Stories! Be sure to check back on Friday for Goldsmith’s profile. Thank you to all of our September Selects participants, and congratulations Rosalind!
You are onewithbody, spiritlife, sweet entanglement of force and form—heart and mind cleaving to body and body cleaving to heart and mind. Continual embrace. Ecstatic.
You wake up. Yawn. A long, drawn-out yawn from deep inside. Sleepy eyes, tousled hair. You stretch. This skin, this flesh, this you.
Your body is you. In your scant eleven years on this earth—you’ve never questioned it. Never had to. It carries your spirit inside, and you carry it in your small sturdy shoulders, your spine.
The feel of it is this, isn’t it: small and rickety, tentative as a foal as you step out onto a cold stone floor from a warm bed. Born into the day. It is early yet.
You swim in the fresh lake water. Waves course over you. You swim like a creature made of water. Inside you feel an aliveness, a dolphin spirit, and you own the breath and the joy of it, the triumph—to be alive inside your body—imagine—this living, tactile, fluid form that you have and that you are. Your stick legs, knock-kneed, kick up tiny storms as your own life energy ripples out from you and into the water around you. Gift to gift. You revel in the command of body—you spirit it into movement.
At times it turns and plays tricks on you—those burned fingers, that swollen toe—but pain can’t hold it back. You dance to the measure of body, and its music is always with you. Cold after the swim, you wrap its shivers in a thick white towel, plunging it into a new warmth as your body plunges you into new joy, blue lips and all.
