Numbers

Thirty Two. Seven. One hundred and ahem.

Numbers. Not definitions.

Walking through surround by racks and sizes telling me I must reach past to the hidden places to find where I fit. Not quite a plus but somewhere between, awkwardly falling amongst frumpy and skin tight. Feeling betrayed by something as much of me as something can be. Not my shape, we don’t make that size, maybe something looser. Maybe something different. Maybe try somewhere else. Like the “in” isn’t interested to carry what I could carry on my exterior to define what people see before they speak with me.

They are numbers.

Numbers on pieces of metal you are pushed onto before you can stand. To the times in front of your gym class learning about being “in” shape but maybe our shapes are different and I was taught in kindergarten that round pegs don’t fit in square holes - so, oh educated professional standing in front of me, tell me did you miss that lesson - that you are trying to push me in one now. To the scrub wearers shaking their head and calculating numbers in their minds while they exclaim that you don’t look like your number, but that’s what I've been trying to say.

I’m not a number.

Kiosk standers lining you up telling you all the things you aren’t enough at. All the things you’re too much at. Take our pill. Fix your hair. Give your hand. Lend your ear. Like my body is the local buffet for you to pick and choose what you like and what you want to reorder to make it better. This is not a binder, my pages can’t be ripped out and rearranged like you please. I am bound. Bound with leather and marked and let me tell you now, in order to not disappoint, that I don’t have an index or page numbers for you to flick around because as I said before this is an all-or-nothing deal.

You can’t choose my numbers. You can’t make me numbers.

I am beautiful and, yes, full and sometimes empty from the way you make me feel by telling me I’m not enough to play this part or run this race or be in time with the things that are right in your eyes, but let me say that maybe you aren’t looking through the right set of glasses because I may be a round peg and something you call “full”, but maybe I’m not defined by the way my fed belly hangs over the fabric I push my thighs into. And maybe I’m more then the way parts of me jiggle when I run to his embrace. And maybe I can wear more than a yard of fabric and still be seen as desirable and maybe I don’t have to be hidden behind a crowd and maybe I shouldn’t have to shop in the shadows and maybe I am more than you have assumed. And maybe I’m more in different ways. For I am not defined by numbers. What matters to me is not the size in my jeans but the size of my heart, and not the feel of spandex holding me in but the feel of my soul letting go of prejudice and opening up and being vulnerable and loving people without sucking in the parts of me that are as much of me as anything could be. And maybe I like the way my hair falls wrong and divine body was designed.

I am not a number. I am a person.

A person who can’t be written out in binary – you’ll need a dictionary to define me.