I was sitting in the kitchen while Eric was preparing lunch, watching as he tossed the shrimp peels, the lemon rind, the parsley stems, into the trash. Eric loves to cook. He derives so much of his value — his sense of identity — from his ability to feed and nourish others, to prepare food as delicious as it is wholesome. Cooking isn’t just what Eric does, Eric IS A COOK.

The scampi was, as most of Eric’s meals are, delicious. But, as I was cleaning-up, throwing away the remaining waste, I got to thinking: If a chef claims the finished meal, don’t they also need to claim the waste? The trash? The rotting parts? The shit? How can just one part of the meal, one part of the ingredients, one state of the food, reflect the chef?

The more I thought on this, the more clear it became — the scampi, all rupa, reflects only itself. It is nama that is a choosy narrator, curating a story, claiming the parts to ignore, and the parts to highlight. To be a chef we must claim only the delicious meals, only the tasty parts of a meal, only the peak moment of food, the rest is discard like the shrimp peels and the lemon rind. Incidental. Passing parts of the story. The compost heap is not us, it is not what we claim, its organization and ordering not a sign of our status as a great arranger.

My body of course is just like a meal: If my body really reflected me, why are there so many moments I am embarrassed by it? Why the dissonance between the wrinkles I see in the mirror and the me I imagine myself to be? Why would I pluck and discard the gray hairs –not me/not mine — while carefully washing and conditioning all the brown ones that are left? There is a disconnect between how I see myself –the me I want to be, the body I believe in my heart-of-hearts represents me, reflects who I am, stands-in so the whole world can see ALANA — and, well, reality.

The evidence is actually there, abundant, as plain as the compost bin after a meal, I just choose to ignore it. I am strong (ignoring those times I am recovering from injury, or ill, or have been out of the gym too long). I a beautiful (ignoring the pre-Botox state, the blemishes, the dark circles on sleepless nights). I am buttoned-up and pulled together (ignoring rumpled clothes after a flight, matted hair when I get up in the morning, the stench of my body after a hard workout). I am on top and in control, and this body reflects this deepest of identities and personality traits. Only the recalcitrant wart on my right big toe, the uncontrollable fall allergies, the tooth pain, the fact that I have been locked away from family and friends for over a year fearing a virus that can kill me, beg to differ; these tell a tale of an Alana decidedly out of control, of this body and the world it inhabits, its just that my choosy narrator decides to ignore all this.

I so deeply want this body to reflect me, to shout to the world who I am. I take every incidence of ‘success’ as proof  that I can force this body to conform to my will, my desire, my sense of who I am. I look at the post botox state and think -Eureka!! This here proves I am beautiful, I am in control, ignoring the very clear evidence that the fact I need botox in the first place clearly proves otherwise.  I pretend sometimes is proof of control. I pretend there is affirmation in the moments that a particular arrangement of rupa conforms to my desires.  I pretend that I can claim a state of something while disowning other states. I pretend I can carve out meaning — identity — from the passing states of the rupa I claim, wildly believing there is significance to the momentary impact I can have on these things. Alana, The-Beutiful -Botoxed- Great-Arranger.

Of course ‘I know’ all objects are just 4 elements. The meal, this body.  On some level, I know there is no way to shove identity into cracks between water, fire, air and earth. But still I think I can overlay meaning on top –this body isn’t me, but it can represent me. And there is of course truth to this, what is a representation after all other than something we imagine stands in for something else? My choosy narrator gets to choose. Its just that imagining something represents something else doesn’t mean it REALLY DOES. A hint that this is true is that both the object we imagine represents us, and our imagination itself changes, there is not some immutable pairing between fixed imagination and fixed object.

For a long time, I imagined going back to SF. I imagined it was my home, an SFer was who I was. SF was my future. But as fire season started getting worse, it began to dawn on me, as an asthmatic, that SF couldn’t be my future, it couldn’t be my home. It ultimately strained credulity for me to believe that a place inhospitable to my living and breathing could be who I was.

At 20 I never imagined that my 40 year old body, with its gray hairs, and sagging breasts, and eye crinkles, would represent me. To 20 year old alana, today’s body is some middle aged woman. But my imagination has, reluctantly, painfully, with much dissonance and disappointment, ultimately shifted as the body shifted.  What choice did I have? Form is not obligated to take the shapes I imagine it takes, to follow my sense of self, my desires, ultimately it is me and my own imagination that must adjust. If I fast forward a little, I consider a dying body, a corpse, the inevitable end for this body. Much like SF, there will come a point that it strains credulity to believe that this shifting, decaying, sack of skin and bones can represent me, can be me.  But, as my clinging testifies to, I am not there yet…

Right now, I am just sitting around waiting for this body to break and die. To reach a point where it is an inhospitable place to live, to breath in. To no longer be able to build my fantasies of a future life around. And while I wait, I will pay for my ignorance — my denial of the truth — with the labor, born of clinging, to preserve; the agony of loss when those efforts to preserve fail; the thousand daily embarrassments, disappointments and disgusts as I reconcile myself, again and again, to a body that simply won’t, can’t, be the reflection of me that I want it to be.