Divorce

I take some words for granted. Divorce is more than splitting rings. Although it is mostly used for ending marriages, Dictionary.com says it can be: total separation; disunion: a divorce between thought and action.  Could they serve up divorce papers between mind and body? The mind would always be too smart to sign, though; mind needs body to live. Mental calculations need smooth running blood and a full stomach. But the body needs a mind that will not interfere will that delicate internal machinery. My body has been breathing before my mind knew what would happen if it didn't. 

But mind and body are not in harmony. Every day is a constant count of calories and food intake, an obsessive need of the mind to limit the body to an equation that adds up to 1200. Recounting, recounting, running over everything all day. Going to sleep empty. Forcing the body to quiet itself when it is hungry but the 1200 has already been reached. 

But divorce is not quiet. It is forceful. It calls up images of broken hearts and torn photographs, belongings loaded up into two separate trucks. Divorce is not casual; it is ordered and made of hard lines, x’s, and inked signatures. If only all divorces could be signed, slipped in envelopes, and shipped away. I wish I could divorce myself from the numbers in my head, the constant counting. Serve up a paper, point me to the x and I will set myself down in ink forever if it will give me total separation from this number-rut in my head. How many hours is the counting running in the background, going back and forth between all the calories I’ve eaten in a day, making sure I am still on track for my daily equation? This companion is tiresome. I don’t want to share a house with it anymore. I want to take my body to court and have a judge give the numbers a restraining order. I can’t do it myself. And that is something about divorce, too. Divorce is not something you can do for yourself; you need an outside force. You need someone else to help you cut away what’s weighing you down.