“Flesh Fruit:” I am also my body

The image shows a person curled up inside the base of a magnificent jackfruit tree. The aerial roots dig into their back, spreading their flesh, and exposing their spine. Their insides are stretched and sinuous. The bulbous fruit of the tree is colored in greens, yellows, and pinks. The leaves have no internal definition, and the viewer can clearly see the whimsical multi-colored cloud wash. 

This piece came to me during my last flare up. I was lying in bed, my wretched spine aching and hurting. I hadn’t been able to do anything that day. I would start a task, and immediately begin to feel the knobs of my spine shifting and twinging uncomfortably. I would endure for as long I could, the pain swelling, until I was forced to lie down again. Not for relief (there was never relief), only pitiful reduction. And while I was stuck there, my mind drifted into a vision. 

I imagined reaching into my back, ripping through the skin, plunging my fingers between the wet, bloodied lips of my sliced flesh until I reached my spine. The spine that felt like shards of porcelain encased by tissue sludge. I would extract all the bones, one by one; and by ridding myself of my skeleton, I would rid myself of pain. When I was finished, I would be a collapsed lump of inverted flesh, floppy and blissfully pain-free. 

But brutal reality persisted, and I knew despite my vision, I could not extract the pain from my body. They are not separate. This pain is a part of me, a marvelous product of my body’s survival instinct: an alarm that something is wrong. I was born with a genetic disease that became symptomatic in my early twenties. I live every day of my life built wrong, and the alarm wails. I hate my pain, and I am also sometimes in awe of it. And regardless of what I feel, I continue to live, to grow, to create, and this horrifying, incredible thing is a permanent part of my whole existence.

The tree exposes the interior, as a chronic illness rips us open, but it’s not foreign intruder. The tree and the body are intimately entangled, they form a single system: a single entity. Flesh grows within the fruit of the tree, as flesh is sucked out of the body. The fruit swells, creating new life. I am suffocating, and I am in bloom. I am black and white, and I am bursting with color. I am a bleak, miserable thing, and I am splendor. I am the body, I am the tree.

“Flesh Fruit” is a product of this tension. That there is something fundamentally disturbed about my body, and that I am still wonderful. My body is a miracle machine, one that I would discard and trade in without a second thought if only given the opportunity. But no such opportunity exists; this is my body, and it will be my body forever. So I am left to make sense of this undeniably awful suffering, that is an inalienable part of me. 

I have not resolved this tension. I have not made sense of my illness, I have found no silver lining. Pain has not made me stronger (in fact, it has undoubtedly made me weaker). I doubt I will ever come to a conclusion that I can articulate, but at least, while I was drawing “Flesh Fruit,” I found some temporary peace muttering to myself, I am the body, I am the tree.