I am a friend to my body. I forgive my body and treat it with the same loving kindness I would like to receive.

Picture a friend arriving with a limp. You don't inform them their knee is a disappointment. You ask what happened, you find them a chair, you adjust the plan for the evening.

The body gets none of that. It gets audits. It gets blamed for aging, for hurting, for not being the shape it was at twenty-four, as though it had been slacking off on purpose.

Forgiveness is a strange word here, because it implies an offense and mostly there wasn't one. It carried you to this point. It ran a fever when a fever was needed, healed things you never noticed, and kept your heart going through every night you spent worrying about it.