Bodyscaping
I’ve had three boyfriends in my twenty-four years on Earth. Number one: Joey Alosleazy. I was fifteen and he was two years my senior. I hadn’t ever spoken to him before he asked me out. I thought he was cute enough. And, as I told my skeptical friend, “someone has to date me.” I told him on our first date, fishing at the river in my full-length leggings, that he would be lucky if he ever got to see above my ankles. We lasted about three weeks.
*
Dr. Hedley’s hands are strong, dry and calloused. I can tell even through the strange scratchy fabric of the specialized tank top. He rests his hands on my sides, moves his thumbs across my shoulder blades. Next, my hips, his fingers pressing through tank top and thin layer of skin to feel the bones arcing underneath. After this his hands bend me over, my own stretch down towards my toes. His fingers walk down each vertebra, tracking the discordant pattern of my spine.
I am eleven years old and just starting to understand what it means to have a body. What it means is this: the three-hour drive from my home to Boston Children’s Hospital. The too-clean smell of the radiology waiting room. The Disney shows I’m just a little too old for playing silently on the television in the corner. The foam-and-plastic brace stamped with Wile E. Coyote being made just for me. My mother and I huddled at the desktop computer back home, coming up with a plan to keep me out of surgery, and the hands of a dozen different doctors on my back.
*
Number two: Alex/Craig. We were both seniors that time. Alex/Craig was a friend of my friend. They worked together at The Big Y. Alex/Craig was nice, I guess. He kissed me often, which I didn’t mind. He never touched me. I broke up with him on the day of the winter formal dance. Makeup on, hair curled, dress waiting on my bed. Panic lancing through my adolescent body. I didn’t want to be seen like that – belonging to him. I stripped it all off and ate candy with my friends instead.
*
It’s been years since I was in a hospital. Years since anyone but me had occasion to examine my body. I make the mistake of looking in the dimly lit dressing room mirror between changes of clothes. This is supposed to be a fun trip, the opportunity to have clothes for a new year of college paid for. My mother stands outside, calling questions to me about sizes and sales that I can’t answer because I’m too busy choking on the sight of myself. I just cannot stand it.
I cannot stand the way my left hip is carved out, fat and muscles atrophied from years of wearing that stupid brace twenty hours a day. I cannot stand the way my right waist folds over itself, or the way the left hardly curves in at all. I cannot stand the way my left shoulder sags, the way the right one pops up, the way my right ribs are pulled back, splayed out like a blood eagle, or the way my left ones collapse against each other. I cannot stand the way my breasts hang, heavy, useless, and damning on my chest. I look away as quickly as I can and trip on my sweatpants in my hurry to redress. I do not buy any new clothes. I’m done with dressing rooms for today.
*
Number three: Sid. Oh, poor Sid. We were young professionals, at the end of or a few years out of college. He had a thick, scratchy beard that enveloped my face whenever we kissed. He liked to interrupt me mid-joke to tell me that I was beautiful. He looked at me with glassy eyes and held my hand tightly when we walked through moonlit Boston streets. I think he might have really liked me. We watched The Boys on his couch one afternoon. It was the first time I’d been to his place. The weight of his arm around my shoulders was as heavy and terrifying as the sight of the bed corner through the open bedroom door. I broke up with him within hours.
*
Home alone, fifteen and bored, I try to force my body to look how I wish it looked. I steal my stepfather’s jeans to wear, button the flannel he gave me after it shrunk in the wash over the two sports bras I’ve used to flatten my chest. It hurts my ribs and it’s a waste of the few hours I have out of the brace, but I have to try. Downstairs in the bathroom, I pull my long hair back into a low bun. I wish I could cut it. I wish to God that I could, but I asked my mother again, and she said no (again).
I take the contour kit my friend got me for my birthday and use it to change the planes of my face. I deepen my cheekbones. Shade the sides of my nose, the space under my lips, my temples. I darken the shadow under my jaw until the edge is sharp and square. I fill in my eyebrows next. I use cover up to lessen the plumpness and pinkness of my lips. Press them into a hard, masculine line. With my mother’s soft brown eyeliner, I crosshatch my skin, imagining hair sprouting from my chin and cheeks. The lines will never be fine enough, the facsimile never close enough to make it reality. It’s okay. It will all have to come off in the shower anyways.
*
I cut my hair in October. My hairdresser Mary tells me I am the calmest person she’s ever taken that much hair off of. I don’t tell her that all that hair was never mine at all. I don’t tell her that I am a marble statue in-progress, or that I have been slowly chipping away at what I think might be the real me. I smile and thank her and give her a fifty-percent tip for saving my life with a pair of scissors.
Six months after this, I will fall in love, and when they ask to touch me, I won’t hesitate. And I won’t be thinking about the doctors who manipulated my body like a puzzle, or about the boys whose hands I’d avoided like they were knives. I will be thinking how different a body feels when it is loved. I will be thinking how rare a thing it must be to have someone know you inside and out and choose to crawl back inside again and again and again.
My new lover tells me my body is perfect, and for the first time ever, I believe that it might be. Because it is mine. Because it is me.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Creative Nonfiction | Back to Volume 19, Issue 1 – Summer 2025
About the Author
Autumn L. Duke graduated from Emmanuel College and is currently pursuing an MFA in writing from the University of New Hampshire. Their creative nonfiction pieces “Exoskeleton” and “Patterns of Love” were published in Medical Literary Messenger and Oyster River Pages respectively. Their fiction piece “Personal Effects” was published in Bodega Magazine. They are a nonbinary, disabled, queer writer living in New Hampshire with their pet rabbit and when they are not writing, they are making art.