To the Estranged Body in Bali
Bali offers firm ground after years of free fall.
Somewhere between Denpasar and Bingin, the road takes a hard left. Thick steam rises off the asphalt like fog, obscuring the legs of a mob of rust-colored chickens. The car stops abruptly at a makeshift boom gate fashioned from rotting wood, and the driver drops a few coins into a red bucket sitting at the feet of a sleepy-looking woman. The gatekeeper nods and climbs her gnarled hands up the pulley to let us pass.
I’m staying in a spattering of huts tucked into the thick rainforest that lines the cliff faces, at a vacation village that welcomes mostly surfers, honeymooners, and greying nomads. An American man wrangles two aggressive-looking surfboards onto a tiny blue scooter while a woman watches on. I notice her strong arms and lean legs and feel relieved you’re obscured under a cavernous linen dress. The setting sun casts tangerine streaks across the horizon as I walk down a set of ragged stone stairs towards the Indian Ocean, where constellations of human shapes on colorful surfboards stud the horizon.
Unlike the competent ocean people out there, standing with me on these pale, corroded rocks, you are a mess. Swollen, saturated with the wrong kind of hormones. For months now, you’ve been kept far from processed food, sugary cocktails, and charred hunks of meat. I know that this time, the deprivation is all in the name of self-healing. But still, it feels precariously close to the eating disorder that likely made you sick in the first place. You’re tired, cramping, knotted up somewhere inside. I look at the surfers and back down at you, an ill-prepared body. I wonder how you’re going to duck, paddle, and launch yourself into waves the size of the grass-roofed alang alang lining the beach.
Later, in the sprawling, open-air kitchen, I scan a laminated menu handed to me by the Balinese chef. Wasps awaken in my chest as I read from the list, all skewered slices of charred chicken, spiced and roasted pork, rich satay sauce. I don’t know how to articulate my nutritional restrictions, let alone whether they’re helping, and the chef’s smile inverts as I order a side of urab; a pile of coconut-dressed green beans and crucifers. After the meal, you protest, unfulfilled, and I can’t help but wonder how I will ever heal you if doing so leaves you so hungry.
The next morning, I wake at 6:00 a.m. to the shrill crow of a local rooster. I pull on my still-damp bathing suit and wander out of the stilted gazebo. Everything is brighter than I remember, impossibly languid and dreamlike, and for a second I forget you’re coming with me. I wave to the chef, a load of laundry balanced on her hip, and continue down a shady path to the parking lot where the surf instructor is leaning against a black van, grinning. A backwards cap restrains his dark hair, reveals knowing eyes and a crooked smile.
His white t-shirt reads: “Lost in happiness I have no fears.”
We bump along a dirt road, the ocean undulating alongside us like a turquoise sheet in the wind. When we park dangerously close to the cliff edge, you make your fears known. The instructor lets out a caw. I don’t know what good surf looks like, but I take in the huge masses of energy building in the south, wrapping around the point and breaking in long clean lines parallel to the shore. I fidget with the sunscreen cap; the water looks powerful, dangerously shallow, and eons out of my league.
The instructor lays flat to the ground and taps the dust with his right hand; I’m supposed to follow. I press my hands into the earth beneath my armpits, wait for his “up,” and jump to my feet in one burst. “Again,” he says. Again, again.
“I didn’t want to be a woman who needed so much, assumed that no matter what, you’d still be able, fertile. But now your constant ache reminds me of what I’d forgotten—that so much of survival is about maintenance. ”
As he loads the boards out of the van—a thick, red foam nine-footer for me and a sleek white thruster for him—I search fruitlessly for a path down to the white sand beach. The instructor laughs, makes an arcing line with his finger toward the horizon; we’re going to throw our boards off and plunge in after them.
My heart ploughs up my esophagus.
“Remember, when we’re out there, you need to fully commit,” he says. “When you second guess yourself, you fall.”
I take a deep breath, and jump. The water is a cool, intense blue—hues so deep I feel disoriented. Floating between two worlds, a past I know and a future I’m yet to, I am weightless. It takes all of my focus to remember that I’m here to learn not just a new sport, but perhaps also a new way to be. I want to feel less alienated from you. More at home inside this skin.
The instructor pushes me into a wave so big it casts a shadow on my back. As I struggle to stand, it sucks under itself and I’m thrown around and around like a lone tea towel in a washing machine. I kick hard towards the sky, gulping air as I squint after my board.
It’s floating on either side of me, snapped in two distinct pieces.
As you swim after the ends, struggling to unite them, I am overcome with guilt: for the board and for us, you and me, also divided in two. I’ve felt estranged from you for a long time. I thought if I could make you into a thing of admiration, then I could feel safe with you. So I fed you cigarettes and wine for a year. Ran until my mouth tasted acrid. Resented you when night after night you wouldn’t let me sleep. Eventually, after envisioning only a half-life ahead of us, something lucid in me recognized that you would never be thin enough; you would always be hungry. As I ate, you grew back into yourself. But even then, years before the progesterone shots and scans started, I knew something inside of you had broken. I’d hoped this roaring ocean would help us need each other again.
Our second day in the water is just as depleting. The waves are turbulent and confusing, breaking everywhere, impossible to read. The instructor tells me to trust you, though I don’t know what that means. Occasionally, the board drags along for a little bit in the frothy whitewater, my legs splayed awkwardly wide and arms held out straight. Most of the time, I’m still nose-diving, flipping end-over-end, and coughing up seawater.
How much can a body endure? I’d wondered months ago, staring at the ceiling of my gynecologist's office. I braced against the cold rod roving around, capturing images of my ovaries. After years of amenorrhea—an absence of menstruation that occurs when a body experiences a severe state of insufficiency—my doctors suspected endometriosis. “But there’s no way to know without further testing,” said the steely-eyed doctor.
I didn’t need surgery to confirm my own suspicions: that I’d done this to you. There’s no scientific evidence to conclusively link endometriosis and anorexia, but I’d broken you once before, convinced that your ability to have survived on very little had made you exceptional, tough, and resilient. I didn’t want to be a woman who needed so much, assumed that no matter what, you’d still be able, fertile. But now your constant ache reminds me of what I’d forgotten—that so much of survival is about maintenance.
Before entering a wild sea, surfers watch the waves; they do not haul themselves blindly against the forces of nature. And even the sea, seemingly unvanquished, needs protection and care to survive. It had never occurred to me you needed the same.
By the fifth day, I’m resolute. I watch the instructor fall away under the lip of a chest-high wave, reading only bliss on his face. These waves can fill a person with trust and wonder—here, there’s no gawking at bleeping machines, no telltale side-eyes between weary nurses. I get to focus instead on what you can do. It’s just me, trusting in you, learning we can still take on hard things. We can be struggling and strong at the same time.
I turn and face the nose of my foamtop to the bay. I lay down and feel my biceps strain as I dig deep in the choppy water; my abs contract as I lift my torso. I know I’m in the right spot when the nose of my board just grazes the surface. Then, I ride the whitewater so far in that the nose hits the shore and sends me flying face-first into the pebbly sand. A patch of skin on my shoulder is missing, rubbed raw, but I’m laughing, ecstatic.
Back in the alang alang, I stretch my arms and legs, releasing the tension from my muscles. I take a hot shower and gently scrub everywhere. I rub lotion on my crimson skin. And it feels good to lay my hands on you, to hold your reality in my palms. Without you, I wouldn’t be able to experience the wide-awake, fear-eclipsing happiness of skimming across the ocean on a bit of foam. And it strikes me that you are my only companion, not just in this ocean but always, no matter what, for as long as we both may live.
Later, I sit starving as the chef slides a bowl of nasi goreng between my cutlery. I swallow forkfuls of hot rice and egg, washing it down with whole, sweet coconuts. I know this isn’t over for us. After all, I am both the sick body and the sickness. But I’ve learned that you are never really broken, as long as you allow us to come back together in the endless churn of waves.
As the garden dims to dusk, I know that I don’t need a thing. I don’t feel too hungry or too full. We are here, for the first time in a while, together in one place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ali Francis is an Australian journalist and essayist living in the Catskills, New York. Her work is published in Narratively, The Guardian UK, Bon Appétit, SELF, Domino, Shondaland, and Vogue, among others. Find her at www.alifrancis.me.
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Header photo by Linus Nylund.