You know, you think you have an idea of yourself: you are this tall, you are this complexion, your problem areas as prescribed by sisterly columnists since you were twelve are these, your BMI fluctuates between this number and that number, your pomological body reference is ____ which means you need to wear outfits shaped like ____. And then suddenly, the mean and tessellating mirror steps out before you and your punishment of existence is to look upon its aluminum recomposition of your corporeal impedimenta. Ghastly, is it not? The shock of azure veins and little dents in the dermis, craggy as maritime patterns cast on low-tide beds of rotted sand; the hunkering mass of flesh above each buried notion of a kneecap; the swelling beneath the ribs that refuses to be displaced by better posture or absent breath. Is this always how it’s been? When did I start looking like this and does everyone else see, too?
It’s stupid and it’s vain that this feeling is provoked by bike shorts. I wanted this certain style of short not for biking even though I do a lot of that in earnest. I wanted bike shorts because proper female women sporting their feminine womanly wear decided bike shorts are valuable now: these fragments of attire regulate hormonal trajectories and lustful inquiries and judge whether or not one is deemed worthy of beautiful assignment. I wanted bike shorts despite never once ever feeling any amount, no inch, no ounce, of love for the legs that have grown as stumps from my hips. I wanted bike shorts to prove I was, like the women that navigate ferocious feral tides, an asset to society rather than a defect, of whom there are supposedly many, and against which the preventative terms are so vague and strobing that it’s near impossible to note what’s relevant, aesthetically, just as it’s near impossible to stay sane while updating your aspirational dream log on the daily as you perform check-ins with Instagram and study exiguous sirens on the street in order to grasp what it means to be seductive/insatiable/allowed, only then to lose hold of it all against the sickly sea-surface which foams up to drown you no matter how furious your paddling. I wanted bike shorts to be good enough and does it surprise anyone that I’m not? I plump out like proofed dough. The flesh above my hamstrings is shingled and translucent. I had no good reason to buy them yet I did, and they came to me folded beneath diaphanous tissue, and there was no looking back because to at least point towards a status-based ideal must be better than refusing it. And I fear what would happen to me if I did – refuse it – as in how unseemly would I get, how fine the lattice of cellulite, at what point the jump from pear-shaped to apple, how brutal the objective and conclusive rejection? And if it’s not this season’s bike shorts, it’s winter’s denim or next year’s sundress. It’s anything that meets my body at the juncture of performance and purchase: I weave my way through trends and I ape the style of prettier people, deciding whether or not to drop cash and shed breaths of self-worth at the till in order to continue my aimless pursuit. Stupid and vain, and for the life of me, insurmountable.