Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,26

becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence. It’s no wonder I was thin, no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing, no wonder some of us vanished through undereating like a country ceding territory, an army retreating, until it ceased to exist.

I had a body. I had been a small, wiry child, withdrawn but active in my own pursuits, roaming the hills and climbing trees, and then at thirteen I suddenly grew several inches, and it took many years for my flesh to catch up with my bones. I was five feet seven and less than a hundred pounds when I left home, and then weight came gradually, slowly, enough to push me over to a hundred that first year I was away from home and by my thirties I was more or less average. But for a long time I was unusually thin, not lean like young women who have little fat over their muscle, because I had so little muscle either.

My skeleton was not far from the surface. My iliac crests jutted out so that people sometimes thought I was carrying something in the front pockets of my jeans. I thought of them as pearl-handled revolvers. When I let the bathwater drain out while I lay in the tub a pool formed on my hollow belly. My ribs showed. I had a waist so small a gay man once quipped that I did not have a torso but, like a wasp or a bee, an abdomen and a thorax. It was my friend David Dashiell, and he used the word thorax, and we were friends partly because we could banter like that.

There is a picture taken by the man who was walking with us while I sang “Ready for War” shortly after I moved into the apartment. It’s of me in a gray 1940s suit I wore constantly as my dress-up outfit, or rather of me wearing the suit’s pencil skirt and a man’s vest turned backward and belted into a sort of backless top, without the jacket. I have my back to the camera, I’m pressed up against the wall with its rectangles of molding, head turned to the right, a little hat with a veil over a face that still looks childish, a back that looks vulnerable, unformed, and elbow-length black gloves on. I’m trying to take shelter in my shadow.

The clothing speaks of an attempt to be elegant, sophisticated, to be an adult, to be ready for the world and find a world ready for me, a portrait of all those aspirations of youth. The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once. The waist of that skirt I measured before I gave it away when I was pretty sure it would never fit again unless I became deathly ill; it was twenty inches.

Being so thin made me frail, tired, limited in my energies, easily chilled; maybe it made me more of a target: I was the opposite of robust, and all that punk rock was partly an attempt to imbibe a spirit that would counter the frailty, or perhaps it was that my flesh was frail but my spirit was savage. I sometimes think I fled to the city in my youth because to run in the other direction, to the country or the wilderness, would have required a physical vigor that I didn’t have then. I could walk great distances, I could dance for hours, but I had waves of fatigue that were probably blood-sugar drops when I could hardly stay awake, and I had dizzy spells when I stood up suddenly, and I was often tired.

Being thin is seen as a virtue, as a consequence of discipline, and self-restraint, and so it’s often admired as though it is a sign of character. But it’s often just a sign of the genetic lottery or that phase of youth before the flesh catches up with the bones. Some people insisted that I was so thin because of anorexia or bulimia, eager to make what they envied pathological, undesirable (and there were years of