At least you’re trying. Those are the words that keep coming to you. At least you’re trying. You meet deadlines and take walks. You go outside when you feel like you need to, and stay in when nothing else makes sense. So now, you’re sitting in the park, sun spots covering your legs like the animal that you feel you are, reading the book that’s been collecting a thin layer of dust on your desk for three months. There’s a wedding to the right, and a proposal photoshoot to the left, and the park doesn’t smell like grass or soil but like perfume from a department store and new shoes, and the breeze is blowing a little too hard, so hard in fact that your hair is no longer perfectly placed on your head, making you feel like an eyesore in the background of the happy couple’s photos.
The part of trying that no one talks about is when you fail to see the results that are assumed to be produced when you start trying. But, you can appreciate that you have something to think about at the end of the day as you scrub all of the dead skin off of your face and use four creams and two serums to make up for the fact that you didn’t keep up with your routine last month, but then you realize that you forgot to wear your sunscreen today, and then you’re angry, really, really angry, and you decide that you won’t brush your teeth because you did enough trying for the night and brushing your teeth would kill you.
Your callused toes are not looking up to par for the warm seasons, which perfectly matches your somewhat flat complexion and stubby fingernails. You always think that the warm weather will rid of the fat under your arms, or at least your disdain towards it. But it never does, which is probably for the better, since everyone on the internet seems to think that you should love yourself, or at least accept yourself, but then you remember that you don’t have to do anything, and if you want to hate yourself, you can. You go to the beach despite being scared, knowing that you picked out the only swimsuit that flattered your clunky body but feel cute anyway, maybe because you’re glad that you’re trying.
Lying stomach-down on the sand, you re-read the back of your book over and over, avoiding actually opening it because you know that it’s smarter than you. “A timely and elegant collection,” a pompous, horrifyingly intelligent critic at The New Yorker states. You wonder if you’ll ever be timely or elegant, or at least be able to use those words with power and poise, but thinking about your potential power and poise heightens your senses in all the wrong ways, and suddenly the sun is frying your skin and the wet air traps you, suffocating you, until your partner motions to you from the water, inviting you to let the waves support your body for a while, so you run to him, leaping and laughing and thinking to yourself, at least I’m trying.
Emma Pilger
Nonfiction
BFA Writing 2024
Woodland Park, Colorado
