Dress Up

In the lockerroom, after a complete flop-out in the steamroom -- almost falling asleep, but not quite, an icy shower brought me back -- I'm noticing all the women's bodies, each so different, all alluring in a strange way. How did we ever get stuck in this woman's magazine wasteland that dictates so narrowly how we should look?

A tall woman, a veritable Alice in Wonderland after a DRINK ME bottle, stretches skyward, her hips knife-sharp and almost non-breasts like two tiny pink targets painted on a flat board, pretty like 2D rosebuds on a china cup -- and makes me think maybe being SO THIN ain't so good. I had a very skinny boyfriend once, nothing to hold on, didn't like that, and rolling around in bed was as cosy as dancing with a skeleton. Thumbs down. Get some meat on those bones.

And bending towards another locker, there's a really large woman. I think to myself -- how do you get like that? And I think, bravo to her to come to this gym at all. And in the steamroom, a lovely girl, strong and shapely, beautiful thing to see, gets me feeling sexy and makes me think of a few men I know.

We dress and it gives us a distinction or lack of, but surely divides us. A woman, quite pregnant, waddles in and I smile to see all of our curves and bulges, muscles, bellies, women in every manifestation. We go home to our lovers, our husbands, our sons, our daughters, our bodies.