My Body is a Gross Temple

by Aurore Phipps

My body is a temple. A pretty gross temple at times. An un-tweezed, unclean, un-fucked, bloody, sweaty, smelly temple. With thick chin hair and a bush the size of the Amazonia. I don’t comb my hair every day. I sometimes let my nails reach new world records for the longest nails in all of France and I forget to pumice my feet almost as soon as I remember to. I’m a working woman with side hustles, chronic illness, and shaky mental health who has recently taken a vow of abstinence so radical that the last person who had taken a close intimate look at my feet was some emperor guy somewhere in Ancient Mesopotamia. Feeling gross coincidentally made me feel like I was thousands of years old.

“Women represent the Church! They are models of light, purity, and cleanliness! But most importantly, they are virginal!” is what the preacher at my church would say. I, prepubescent, in the midst of my specifically gross phase could not believe how far I was from not being gross. I had taken on the bad habit of picking at my scabs and limiting my use of deodorant as well as using my saliva to hydrate a dry spot on my hand. I wasn’t a woman but upon hearing these words, I kind of, sort of, had made it my mission to become the kind of woman the Bible implied I should be. A beacon of perfection. A perfectly round pancake. A perky pair of tits. A nice piece of ass. However, as I grew older, I realized that my pancake had a tendency to be uneven and that my tits were doomed by gravity and my ass simultaneously too big and not big enough.

I couldn’t be virginal either. Made aware of sex way too early after the traumatic cannon event that patriarchal violence pushed as a ‘rite of passage’, I felt desire. Gross desire. Made out of fluids and smells and tongues languorously seeking each other.

I couldn’t keep a clean enough bedroom either. And soon, I realized I couldn’t keep a clean enough kitchen either. When I had my period, I left trails of blood like a menstrual snail or a catamenial Ansel and Gretel. My sheets, my bed, this cushion, a sofa, and the edge of the toilet, all covered in blood. Unwilling witnesses of my disgusting female body. Once a year, for unknown reasons, my eye would displace itself out of its socket and I’d have to put it back on like a glass-eyed cartoon pirate from an unnamed Disney animation.

I was failing. I couldn’t represent the Church. At eighteen, the diagnosis weighed on my soul. I was crushed. In true dramatic teen fashion, I cried and shook and prayed and hoped that one day I would be better at hiding how gross I was. At thirty, I didn’t care as much. Lone wolf in my cavern. Dim lights, soft music, pondering on my melancholic solitude, my grossness and I had called for a truce.

A peace treaty had been signed. I would only feel sorry for myself once a month or at least once a week after I had forced my chronically ill body to ingest some fried chicken that would immediately give me the kind of diarrhea that could pass for nuclear bomb testing. (Picture it, my big but not big enough ass, taking a gigantesque watery dump on the desolate land of my womanhood).

I was doubly failing at being a pinnacle of cleanness as a Black woman. My womanhood, never fully granted to me by white supremacy, was required to be more. It needed to be transcendental and quintessential. Non-threatening and wholesome. An ad for a really bland soap that I had to have the smell of, at all times. In the colonial mind, black womanhood, a black void animalistic and wild, had to be tamed with perfumes and artifices and had to be the synonym for complete olfactive silence.

I struggle with the grossness, still. I wonder why things can’t come naturally to me. Why do I have to work so hard to make them happen? The upkeep, the hiding, the performance, the little dance, the extra steps to be seen as clean, to feel clean in spite of the very ontological nature of my existence as a being made out of decaying flesh and blood. The need to conceal, to make disappear. I was a shady guy hiding a dead body in the trunk of my car. Except the dead body was also me and the car was what a woman should be. I rode the car performatively with an unhinged grin on my face that tried to pass for a smile, wondering when the police (anyone getting close to me, really) was going to ask me to park my vehicle and smell the dead body inside the trunk of said car.

Afraid of my pussy stinking up my lover’s place. Afraid of my home never being clean for more than three days. Afraid of the other commuters on the train thinking I was a human Pepe Le Pew. Afraid of leaving blood on my friend’s couch. A life being gross yet perpetually running away from the state of being gross.