“Jam is just fruit that’s been remembered… or forgotten” & other musings.

Notes on letting my new body be lovable. & a cocktail recipe.

There’s something about the energy that comes with being newly single. Not newly heartbroken, newly single. I believe in the distinction. See, once you’re beyond the fray of the initial heart break and frustration, the upcoming healing and the questions that you ask yourself and whatever answers you arrive at. After the purge of any collaborative Spotify playlists and all left behind t-shirts make their way into the donation pile… when your bed’s throw pillows no longer smell of Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather…. When it’s really over, and you’ve gone back to fully spreading yourself across your queen size mattress and you no longer cry when you’re cleaning on Sundays. There. There is the clarity of mind when you decide that you’ve survived.

This was me, April of 2021, after a relationship that made me wonder if I’d ever been easy to love. Or desire. The breakup, when I look back on it, was a power struggle between two very funny people who kept upping the stakes of the joke. And when it was over, I didn’t recognize myself without the jester’s uniform… or what it hid, an expanding, stretching body. The result of a thousand things and also nothing at all, I guess.

And when I thought I was ready, I kept asking myself who I wanted to be when I had the chance to reinvent myself as a single woman in a new body. Fuller at 235. Grown like woman. Heavy like life. Like experience. Like a big breakfast.

I wanted to be perceived the way I hoped a longing potential lover might describe me. The way one man described me in 2018, as cartoonishly gorgeous. So, I decided to lean into the parts of myself I liked most. Something I later gave the language “wholesome hoochie.” I am bright and wholesome, warm and unserious and smiling mostly. With a tendency to ramble when I’m excited, and still there’s a poetry about it. With a tipsy southern drawl, flat “a”s laze off a deep voice. Sounds like the brownest sugar. Like feedback on a record player. Like anticipation. Like come hither. And although I’ve played coy about it, I know very well how the bat of a lash moves the needle on a conversation and makes a date adjust his leg under the table.

But when I sat down to curate my first Hinge profile, I began to obsess. Obsessed over the photos that made me feel my prettiest and also let it be known that I am full in figure and filled all the way out. For fear that someone may show up to our date and be surprised by my size.

When I was in the thick of my dismay and second guessing, a word came to me.

“The fruit of you is so obvious. So abundant. Of course you made the surplus into jelly.”

The thought made me laugh until I shook with tears. Why had I denied my garden?

I set back out into the world with some knowing. I am art. Sustenance. Feast. Nourish. My body looks like me. And Me is interactive and deserving of deep love, deep pleasure, and deep discovery. My relationship with my body is still a work in progress but I have come to love her in big waves, so the criticism became care and quiet “thank you”s for the ways we survived life, and something unlike love and a pandemic together.

The homework from my therapist was to walk around my space naked and stop in every mirror, finding new things to love as often as possible and to thank them for holding me.

I started noticing things. I noticed the ways my stretch marks come up from under my stomach and wave like delicate fingers around my navel. How they look like sunshine, a greeting. Like my feminine is saying good morning to me. Offers a new day. Something like forgiveness. 

I noticed the way my thighs looked so full, sat up against each other like cleavage, like two friends telling secrets and I thought I’d put some words there for them to share with each other. Eventually I got two sets of words tattooed on them, one by Audre Lorde, the other by Anthony Bourdain. Two storytellers at the table for dinner. Assigned reading for the visitors, a prayer back to myself and this body. And every day that I had a moment of naked courage,  I was thankful for the revelations, however small, however stretched, however large. 

I later came to understand that my lovers would be thankful too, for my survival, for the harvest of me. I have smiles and loving utterances tucked into the dark of my inner thighs, left there by men and their hunger. Men who say if they die, they die. Yes, thick thighs take lives too. And bear fruit.

bare fruit.

Apres-cot: A smoky, jammy, fizzy drink on the rocks

Serves 2:

• 2 tbsp apricot jam, thinned lightly with warm water

• 3 oz mezcal

• 2 oz bourbon

• 1 oz campari or aperol

• 1 lemon, juiced

• splash of vanilla extract

• ice

• sparkling wine or tonic water, to float

1. Fill two rocks glasses with ice and set aside.

2. Add the apricot jam and warm water to a shaker, stir until thinned. Add mezcal, along with bourbon, campari, lemon juice, and vanilla extract. Add ice and shake well until very cold.

3. Strain into the prepared glasses and top with sparkling wine or tonic water. Enjoy cautiously.