belly as borderland
My belly is a borderland. It remembers the sharp edges of hunger rattling my ribs, and the heavy blur of fullness after good food eaten too fast. My belly remembers the nights I swallowed my fear while the scene around or inside me crumbled. It remembers pangs that taught me timing. Taught me how to breathe through a pain that comes and goes on schedule….
which is the most useful kind of rehearsal for apocalypse.
I often find myself walking down streets that used to be crowded, with my hand half-curled over my belly like it’s a saved receipt. Tender, folded, important. Not out of shame (anymore). But because this body is a map and that soft fold along my midsection is where I keep what I cannot risk losing.
Sometimes I can feel the first time I learned to fold myself like that. It was a sticky August night during the blackout of ’03. I’ve noticed since then, every moment of deep emotion comes from my belly. Joy bubbles up and over. Grief folds in on itself. Anger bursts out violently and pools in the joints.
But that first night, the streetlights blinked out and the city bared its underbelly. Sirens whined through the night like mosquitoes, and helicopters carved lazy circles in the air. Bodegas left their freezer doors propped open while popsicles melted streams down the curb. The corner boys were louder than usual, smoking and clowning, but their eyes kept scanning the dark. One of them looked at me and called out, “Y’all good?” Y’all? I was alone. Or was he speaking to all the versions of me that I was hiding in my belly? The way he stretched the word “gooooood?” could’ve been a threat or a prayer.
I remember nodding without slowing down, my hand pressing tighter against my belly like I was closing the lid on something fragile. Around me the block was busy with its own survival. People hauling buckets from hydrants, mothers fanning babies, somebody hustling bottled water out of a shopping cart like they’d been waiting for this exact opportunity to present itself. The city was collapsing and expanding all at once, and all I could think about was keeping that seam intact: the line between what the street could see and what it could rip open.
Protecting that place where my wants, my losses, and my possible futures live is the only craft I’ve ever mastered.
I learned on a cold bathroom tile. I got my first period very young; the radiator had died and my friends’s apartment smelled like last night’s fried chicken and an old sweater. I pressed my forehead to my knees and tried not to make a sound. The tile was the kind of cold that took your breath away in the shallow places, and the radio down the hall was blaring 1010 WINS. I bit the inside of my cheek until my mouth tasted like pennies. If anyone opened the door, I’d pull my sweater up, knot my face into “I’m fine,” and walk out like nothing happened
Pain you don’t announce becomes endurance. Endurance becomes a map for how to move through threats without letting everything inside spill out.
My body taught me the exact locations where tenderness can be armor: the soft fold where you tuck a child’s head, the private pocket where you hide your crying, the place you warm soup against your ribs. Those are tactical maneuvers. They conserve what hardening would burn.
There’s bravery in being able to throw a punch; and there’s strategy in keeping your hands free for other work.
On the train home after a friend’s baby shower, I sat with my own stomach and whispered to it like it was a person I hadn’t yet met. People are allowed to think it’s dramatic. They don’t have to know the number of small vows I keep folded under my ribs.
Wanting a child at thirty-four is another fragile line I have to keep in the crease to stop it from being erased. I press my palm there because that palm is a border guard: it holds the future intact while the rest of the world drops bombs, and shoot guns, and finds all manner of ways to get at this tender flesh.
Walking through a city that keeps learning new ways to fail, I find that the belly wants simple things: consistent food, a bed that isn’t rented by the minute, and people who can answer when you whisper “help” into the dark. In a riot or a blackout, you can loot a grocery store, but you can’t improvise a lullaby that makes a body believe it’s safe.
The belly is not a weakness to be disciplined out of you. Protecting it is an act of preservation as quiet and stubborn as breath. When everything else is on fire, I’ll be the one holding a small, ridiculous, necessary thing against my ribs, keeping it from being burned up by the heat.
Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!
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Bethany Nicole
Bethany Nicole
Bethany Nicole
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