Guts
You think your stomach is the place where food is digested, the primary locus of your survival, the engine that converts your fuel. But that’s not entirely true. You see, the small intestine does most of human digestion, leaving the stomach as a large, and in my case clumsy, bean-shaped sack of acids and juices. It can hold up to a gallon of food, stored and waiting for frigid hibernation — much to the chagrin of dieters everywhere — which means the equivalent of 8.34 pounds of fried chicken could be swimming around in a gut-sea of hydrochloric acid, churning like a washing machine gone wild.
Unless you’re vegan. Or if you hate fried chicken, a true travesty for those in possession of nervous guts. Or if you have celiac disease, like me, which means anxious entrails and breadless chicken are de rigueur menu items.
This organ — one I haven’t quite decided if I really need — is said to be your second brain. Mine has declared himself to be a whole other person, a body growing inside me like a parasite with a mind entirely his own. I call him Sherwin. Sherwin doesn’t like to be concerned with the duties of my actual brain. While the dependable brain controls the sensory experiences that are humanity’s methods of interacting with the world, Sherwin responds to foods and stimuli like they’re the blaring of a tsunami siren, warning of impending doom and torrential trauma.
The first time a camera went snaking down the narrow, waterslide-like esophageal portal to probe at the mass that would be Sherwin, I was six. It emerged unscathed from the lighter-fluid depths, but my gnawing abyss didn’t acquire its series of labels and pronouncements until the first in a string of vacillations some seven years later.
Picky. Intolerant. Depressed. Inflamed. Angry. Fiery. Healing.
The mind feeds on the thoughts, scenarios, experiences, and information one interacts with in the world. Daily, synapses bond, twisting to create new connections, webbing the physical ‘you’ with the ‘you’ dreamt in the mind, deciding millimeter by millimeter what one actually is. I’m convinced the brain is more than a scientific organ, best left to exploration by the brightest minds among its ranks. For buried within its spider-web depths is feeling so known it is instinctive, yet so foreign it’s an almost untangle-able enigma. It spreads from our guts, like swarms of butterflies flapping in time.
The stomach too responds, becoming what we feed it — buttery folds of beer guts and chocolate paunches opposed by the relished abdominals of smoothie drinkers and sardine eaters. But the guts that are the peculiar little man inside my belly like to shake and spasm, throwing toddler fits and lightning bolts in response to every feeling and quake of digestion. Sometimes this Sherwin and his cousins, buried in bodies across the globe, conspire together, authoring a multitude of maladies, signing their defamatory signatures on the dotted lines of dis-ease. They demand you alter your preferences and tastes, for them. How demanding they are!
Yet nutrition is more than calories, marching like identical mindless soldiers. Food carries curses, potential migraines, distention, anxiety, and even sickly sadness for the ranks of afflicted.
Though he is the master of sustenance, gatekeeper of all that enters and is expelled from my upper half, Sherwin is not merely an organ, faultily processing life’s provisions. Emotions themselves are felt in his orifice, impressing the deepest most guttural part of every life experience on the appetite of humanity. All one’s highs and lows are wrapped in this pulsing, extracting organ, everything from gleeful joy to paralyzing indecision to burning, hollow pain. The stomach reminds us through taste and touch that living is more than survival, that happiness isn’t simply the pleasure of sugar sweetness. Though gluten-laden delicacies send Sherwin into convulsions, so too can the astringent ache of a guilty conscience or the wrong word spoken from the bowels of anger. Those internal butterfly wings flutter in upset and coo in delight, whirring guts from frenzy to ease to disease again, in tandem and apart from Sherwin’s clutches. They beat when I ignore his wishes, feeding my flesh morsels of bread. They metamorphosize when humans connect, with words, kisses, and even punches. Don’t you feel it too, in your stomach, the moment someone likes you, the instant you know you love them, when the supernatural touches the mortal for a single fated moment, a gift from God?
Hello, I’m Anaiah! Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m a writer, editor, and creative who is endlessly fascinated by people, books, beauty, and words—looking at life and its adventures through the lens of the hope Christ has for us. I work with poetry, devotionals, and fiction and love exploring the introspective, the emotional, the beautiful, and the questions life leaves us all facing. I hope you enjoy!
