Draft from a short story about an undergrad named Audrey

Sometimes I get busy as hell in my head, and suddenly I realize that my body’s gone numb and dark, so I close my eyes a moment and bring it back online. Like reassembling myself. And it’s not easy, pulling my mind out of my problems and back into my body. All my awareness wants to huddle up in my head and get real shifty up there. I have to work it down like a cat from a tree. Usually I start with my back, and my spine, like an invitation for the mind to come down, but if I’m standing sometimes I start with my feet and my legs to pull ground energy up. And it feels like a bright blue light is shooting up long the highways of my nervous system, a blue so bright that it explodes into white when it jumps up into my skull and then my eyes open, totally lit, from inside.

—

The lines felt like visible, incandescent rivers of mercury flowing along my body. They didn’t always flow the way I thought they should, along straight lines, evenly and smoothly, the way through would for a stick figure drawing, for example, or DaVinci’s perfect man. No. There were places— my left lower back, my right inner thigh, all around my neck, my wrists— that the lines got bunched up, like a river running around boulders, or a pile of trash.

I wanted to fix it and treated myself to a massage, which was relaxing. It didn’t fix the lines though. It felt more like being a big dough ball kneaded every which way. He didn’t pull me into straight structure, which is what I wanted. So I picked up an anatomy textbook from the med school library and started working things out myself.

My grades improved when I got the lines straightened out. It felt like I could think better, and clearer. But I began to feel alone on campus, looking through instead of at my peers, so beautiful just on the surface. And below, I could see: each person had organized their body lines around some principle, in the same way a caterpillar wraps itself in cocoon— except I couldn’t tell if anyone would ever change, ever break free. We get all caught up in perfecting the protection.