I bought myself a year´s worth of unlimited bioimpedance readings in order to have more accurate data about my body composition than what a scale and a measuring tape could ever suss out. I had my first encounter with the Oracle Booth last Friday; I had bent the instructions by having my morning coffee to avoid having a full lower intestine messing up the reading, but other than that, I arrived to the disheveled mall fasted and humble. I had popped by the church to empty my bladder and sit in silence beforehand. My presence was not tolerated by an old man who followed me, spewing sibilant, jesusy whispers in my wake as I left a prayer request for the Lord to watch over Finland´s gender minorities. I have never liked that sound; it´s like a nest of snakes stirring, seemingly harmless, but seething visceral poison. I remember it well from my childhood, an ambient noise rising from the faceless masses of ever-reproducing Laestadian aunts, uncles and cousins.
The Oracle Booth stood on the second floor of the mall like a metal insect´s cocoon. I opened the door by showing it a code off my phone; the space was small, uterine, sound-proofed, with a brave little lamp providing the user with the gift of sight, a big trash can on one side of the bioimpedance machine and a disinfectant wipe dispenser on the other. I gave the machine and my hands a quick wipe and wondered why the lighting wasn´t simply built into the cocoon. The lamp seemed so out of space in such a science fictionesque environment. It made me think of cheap hostels, or brothels perhaps. I wondered if anyone had ever cranked one out in the booth. Hopefully not.
As instructed, I stepped on the Oracle´s sensors with bare feet and let her measure my weight. I had progressed perfectly according to my massing plans for the spring, so the number didn´t freak me out; I knew that approximately 50% of the increased weight would be from increased muscle mass, and the whole reason I had bought myself the 12-month unlimited pass for measurements was to be able to track the increases and decreases of lean mass and fat mass as they´d fluctuate in the dance of my estrogen-facilitated hormonal cycles, training mesocycles, and massing and cutting cycles. The Oracle then asked me to place my hands on her handles. Grabbing the two horn-like protrusions growing off of her trunk, I had a hard time figuring out how to hold my arms straight but without allowing them to touch the sides of my ample motherfucking breasts, still here after three years of fighting with the trans clinic system.
The Oracle began to play a light-hearted etude as she took my body apart in a digitalized ritual of drawing and quartering, a twenty-first century sparagmos. My seemingly female body standing on the foot sensors and grabbing the horns of the hand sensors was looking at an image of a male body on the screen. Numbers and graphs were running on the screen as the image´s limbs and torso were being highlighted one by one, in unison with mine, as the Oracle was studying the flow of the electric current that she fed through my body and interpreted as results upon its return back to her as an echo. The readings were encouraging: my muscle mass exceeded typical amounts by far. I did have excess adipose tissue, which wasn´t a surprise, as I had noticed my waistline growing a bit thicker during my massing phase, but that fat was the reason I had sought out the Oracle´s wisdom in the first place. In order to proceed on my journey, in order to break my curse and achieve a body I can happily live in, I must make an offering of succulent, sweet-smelling fat to the gods of medicine.
And so, for the next two moons, I´ll sizzle and burn and melt. Not for any longer than eight weeks; I will not repeat the errors of last year which led to my hospitalization. Endless growth is as impossible as endless shrinkage. A wise man accepts the ebbs and flows of nature, of reality; too long of any one thing turns detrimental. The year consists of four seasons, each consisting of three training mesocycles. Each mesocycle brings new challenges, new stimuli, new demands for the body to respond to. I will adapt, then rest, then adapt to the next demand. All of this is purely within my control; I´m safe and held by this self-implemented order, just as I´m safe when my body is encased within the Oracle as it is being measured and evaluated. The world is out there, the world that sees me as a woman, the world that sees me as insane, as weak, as an object of both lust and pity. But my adversary is not the world. My true adversary are the ideas fed to me about me by the world.
I do not need the world. I turn my back to it and allow the Oracle´s song to lull me into a dream of a body that becomes a home.
EDIT: I later learned that the hand sensors do, in fact, come off the trunk of the machine, thus solving the problem of my tits messing with my posture and the readings. How much of a margin of error there was remains to be seen until next Friday morning!
Lähiönoita 