The Body Is an Archive

I’ve been thinking about my mother’s feet. 

It was the general understanding that all of us children would come to my mother at night so she could bless our sleep– a routine I suspect was established generations ago. I was only reminded of this three weeks ago, when my twenty-one-year-old self crawled up to my mother’s bed and asked her to bless me. Soon after, I instinctively looked at her feet. Muscle memory is a crazy thing.  

In the last minutes of the night, before her own sleep, she would lather them in lotion. The one I remember most? Cuccio Natural Butter Blend Vanilla Bean & Sugar Non-Greasy Lotion.

I would touch her feet sometimes, intrigued at how shiny they were; they were soft but calloused and wrinkled, always well-kept but with a past. I could tell she had lived a life before me. 

A part of me has always detested that I don’t know that life or form part of it.

For years, I have wondered where her feet took her, who they danced with, who they ran to on a good day, and in whose presence they anxiously moved back and forth.

I wondered how she rested them in the hospital bed when she first held me. Were they relaxed? Propped up on a bed? Did she rub them together to soothe herself? At the same time, I would look at my feet back then and wonder. When would I have lived enough where my feet felt worn, lived in, like I had chased down my life, and finally caught it?

I have been catching my reflection on the train. My face is slim. The weight of my youth has come off my cheeks, my eyes have not changed, but they look further now. Which is funny because as I have aged, they have too. My doctor gave me glasses (-1.75, -0.25), but I never got used to them, so I got used to seeing less. 

I don’t know if I look tired, but I feel it. I don’t have any visible wrinkles, but my left eyebrow rises two inches taller than my right one. My lips are dry from the heat, my dimple gets deeper with every laugh, and I have acne scarring from my teenage years or last year, or this one.

This all to say, I find myself feeling distant, guarded, yet intrigued by the woman looking back at me. Her confident posture, but tired, anxious eyes have been trying to tell me something for a while now.

I was showering the other night. I lathered lotion on my entire body. When I finally got to my feet, it was muscle memory. 

I could see myself touching my mother's feet in grief and thought. I moisturized my right foot and then my left, and started thinking about all the places they have taken me. Every callus, with a Dolce Vita ballerina flat to blame–a story.

I traced the now appearing wrinkles or better put– the dents on my feet–thinking about the times they have gotten me in and out of an airplane, stepped in a new country, ran after the M42 bus, walked in late into a classroom, walked across a stage to get a diploma, strolled around aimlessly, stood on my tip-toes to reach love, dangled off a tall chair– restless, were in a room with someone I loved without knowing it would be the last time, and how many times were they tickled, knowing it’s the only place I feel things in. 

I have come to know my two feet, in the least epiphanic way, as my compass. Not my brain, not my heart, because somehow they know before I do where they are headed. It is the limbs, the extremities, they make my thoughts known before I even think them, the way my hands are going for the keys just now as if I even know what words they are forming. 

My feet remind me of my mother’s. I remind myself of her. I am my mother.

They are soft and tired and have maybe a couple more miles in them. Or a lifetime.

I wonder where they’ll be when I find my way, when I fall in love for the last time, or walk out the door without looking back. I wonder if I will have them propped up on a pillow or relaxed on the bed when I hold my firstborn, or where they will be standing when I decide I don’t want to have children. 

I wonder how much they know already that I have not yet been told, the way my face has been screaming at me that I am an adult.

My right foot is tapping the floor– up and down –as if it’s nodding yes to the realization.