Body Friend by Katherine Brabon

Author:Katherine Brabon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2023-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

I went back to the pool that Sunday, in the morning. I didn’t see Frida. I swam laps and went through the motions, the undressing and showering, the drying and dressing. The emergence out into the air afterwards. It was so good to feel good, I craved the water every day. I told myself I didn’t need to see Frida there every time; I would do it alone. Yet it seemed to me I craved the water less when I didn’t see her, as when you have a new, bodily-absorbing crush and each event or day without the object of that crush seems pale, prosaic.

I heard Tomasz telling someone on the phone, perhaps a friend or his mother, that I was doing really well. Perhaps it was merely recovery. All that miraculous feeling, the obsession with the pool, the elemental connection to Frida. People told me I was recovering. You won’t know yourself, was what they said. They uttered phrases that sounded commercial, clichéd: Like new. Good as gold. Well again. Meaning soon, meaning healing. But this presupposed that I had ever really known myself or that the self I knew best was some version back in time, the version most ill, and to be better would be to form a new self.

This seemed to insinuate, too, that the moment of self-knowledge would soon pass or had already passed; I knew myself best when I was in the greatest pain and every movement was dictated by its presence or potentiality, or when I was in the hospital, sleeping through the day, awake through the nights, the uncertain space between pain and recovery, oscillating between the two, never concretely in either state. This thinking—You won’t know yourself—suggested that those states of pain or oscillation were me, were the truth.

When I had considered writing about my illness, which I had mostly avoided, I read an interview with the writer J.M. Coetzee. I have forgotten the content save for what he said about Dostoyevsky’s ideas on writing the self. Summarising Dostoyevsky’s beliefs, Coetzee said: What is self-delusional is to imagine that you can tell the truth about yourself, that it merely takes a certain frankness with oneself and a certain boldness in putting things down on paper and revealing them to other people. The confessional, the faithfully factual, would not, it seems, convey the truth—or would be only one ingredient of it.

A recovery robbed of certainties entails a partial venture back to what one knows, the body and brain ever the same and utterly different as the cycle of illness turns, hooks into the skin, snags the self ever back to it. Representing such a state would forever be in its own cycle of identification and de-identification, familiarity and estrangement.

When I seemed better, Tomasz seemed happier. I went out more often with him. There was less of the hesitation or vexation in his voice when he suggested meeting friends or going to a restaurant. And it’s true that those things had become easier for me.

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