One night at a play, I walked outside with a friend during intermission. I sat on a low concrete step because my knees hurt. My friend didn’t sit. Some people he knew came over to us. I didn’t know them. I’ve learned the hard way that if I am below eye level with someone I don’t know well, my social presence is reduced or erased. I like to be fully present. I am a fat woman in my fifties with arthritis. Getting up from the low step would take some time.
As I shifted toward one knee, they all looked down at me with alarmed expressions as they murmured, “Don’t get up.”
I wanted to get up. It was already proving to be harder to do than I had expected. None of the others were fat. I listened to the murmurs, watching their faces and feeling as if I needed to calm their discomfort at the same time I was working to stand. I wasn’t acrobatic enough that night to do both.
The first pressure I put on my knee made me wince, so I put my palms down on the step, turned my torso, and straightened my knees, slowly lifting my hips.
I was very aware of my belly. Shame was there, along with annoyance with all of them, and a wish to be generous, to make the moment easier. I also had a feeling of such difference, of finding myself out of the category of a casual interaction and into the category of—what?—a problem. I felt tension about my lack of ease with such a basic physical experience as getting up. I also thought that it was all a little funny, that it was no big deal. I really wanted to go take Motrin before I went back to sit in the tight theater seat. I felt sadness because something that had been easy for me was becoming hard. All of this was mixed with thoughts about the play and also a thought about how much of what I was experiencing wasn’t ever going to find its way into words.
I began to walk myself up with my hands on concrete, butt in the air. There was more time than I wanted in which to think. The others were still murmuring. My friend half reached for me, then stopped.
I am slow. I move slowly. I walk slowly. I write slowly. I am not often slow enough to see a moment drop its allegiance to sequence and let wild layers of meaning rush out, geysers of the eternal transforming the insistent landscape of the daily. As I slid my palms across the gritty concrete, I was almost that slow.
The eternal is an old-fashioned idea. In The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, Erazim Kohák wrote: “Eternity here does not refer to an endless prolongation of linear time, as it often does in common usage. It indicates, rather, the awareness of the absolute reality of being, intersecting with the temporal sequence of its unfolding at every moment.”
Time shifted as my fingertips left the concrete.
I’ve been stubborn in offering up the gifts of long stories for those who can tolerate slowness. I am trying my best to say something with the tools I have. I love the life-changing pleasures of reading a novel, but am terrified of asking for such patience in a world in which minds go skipping through cyberspace.
Talking about the quality of slowness in my stories feels a little bit like talking about why I’m fat and whether or not my fatness caused my arthritis. One of the things being a lesbian has taught me is that only those qualities not widely perceived as normal are interrogated to discover what made them the way they are. I come back, then, to some of the things I know I am: Fat. Halt. Slow. Within these things, in writing, in walking, in pain, in discovery, in any given moment I am ringing like a bell, hollow, clappered, clamorous, musical, alarming, shivering with waves of all that I don’t know but can sense. Time dissolves.
I moved my feet closer together on the concrete and raised my head.
I want to speak plainly as a gift to the other fat, halt, and aging among us, and for the young who can’t live within the stories the dominant culture tells on us. I fear isolation. I fear poverty. I fear being punished for not spending more of my life regretting my physical shape.
Those fears, they have fuel. I live here, within my own limitations, within the limitations of an explicitly vindictive culture. But the story of everything that I am afraid of shifts with the most startling agility to the story, the stories, of skin brushing against concrete, which is rasping and warm; of the life between me and another slow person (also, amazingly, some who are fast); of the shaft of time that opens into the eternal, into all that can be known and experienced here, now, by me. We have all the stories, or, no, there is history, there are imbalances of power, there are inheritances of thought and culture. None of us has every story, but I have a body: slow, aching, and fat. It arches, I arch, out into time as if my body were a limb, something grown, something made, turning light into food, stories into smoothly bending joints, time into flesh that plants its palms on the concrete step and walks itself up on its hands like a baby righting itself, like a full-grown woman experiencing new degrees of slowness who rises, turns, and says, “Hello.”
