fiction: you are only your body to the rest of the world
someone told me recently it seems like every woman hates their body. huh, almost like it’s systemic, or something. it made think of this piece I wrote a couple years ago; I never knew why I wrote it in second person, but now I do.
You are only your body to the rest of the world
It was time to start over again. Always a Monday, following a particularly drunk Saturday and gluttonous Sunday. After homework was more or less glanced at, Sunday night was for iPhone-stalking thinstagrams, reblogging impossibly delicate wrists and back fat-less bodies in bikinis and most importantly, reaffirming your Reaffirmations, which had been written in cursive in the margins of notebooks during classes and on secret Tumblr posts after particularly egregious binges.
Don’t eat so you can be lovely
I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy; I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it
Skip dinner, wake up thinner
Shit like that.
The unyielding scrutiny of #thinspo-tagged black and white skeletal forms made you hungry, not the weak, pestering hunger of I-haven’t-eaten-since-lunch, but that indignant, vengeful hunger, that made you simultaneously proud of the day’s absent meals, and ashamed of your stomach’s determined ignorance of the ultimate goal. But you were inured to this ache; you accepted it with the stolidity of a seasoned soldier.
October had come and gone, and within the month, a long-standing least favorite month, you had lost ten pounds, and gained one boyfriend. The seminal First: First non-Dance-Floor-Make-Out kiss, first Real Date, first boyfriend, and finally, your First Time. First time losing your virginity to a boy whom who would cheat on six weeks later. First time for everything.
The first time he brings up your weight, your eyes jiggle in their sockets; nothing else in your body moves.
You’re both lying on his made bed, not tangled up in the sheets but on top of the comforter, not cold enough to be underneath it but not sweaty enough to be this naked. As always, you are unable to avoid the hundreds of second dimensional eyes all looking at you all at once.
His room is wallpapered, floor to ceiling, with magazine pages he has meticulously torn out of, apparently, every Entertainment Weekly and People magazine ever printed. Torn is not even really a good word for it, because there is not a jagged edge in sight. No corner is worn down, no page not exactly level with the one next to it, or below it, or above it. Every night that you have sex (which is nowhere close to every night), you are grotesquely aware that you are being watched, by several pairs of glossy, Photoshopped, smized and squinched famous eyes. You can’t help but lock eyes Kirsten Dunst or (preferably) Adele, or (not preferably), the late Amy Winehouse, while you wait for him to come, nodding along, agreeing with the deceased singer-songwriter that you could do better.
After it’s over, it’s always better. The celebrity eyes become softer, turn judgmental to apathetic, and you both exhale. Like you’d seen couples do in the movies, only not with satisfaction, more like relief.
“I saw Ariel in the library today,” he says, about as sexy as anything you can say
after over-the-covers sex.
“Oh yeah?”
“Mmhmm. Ariel and some of those girls were kinda worried about you.”
Your heart palpitates on the word “worried,” like a snap of the fingers inside your chest.
“Why?”
“I dunno, Ariel was just like, ‘Julia has lost sooooo much weight.’ And I was like, really?”
You smile, kind of. He didn’t know you last year. You never saw any reason for him to know.
“I didn’t even know they’d noticed.” This is obviously a lie, but you take a liking to the idea your friends are taking about it when you aren’t there.
“I mean. She just said, like, ‘oh, last year she was you know, average, now she’s like, thin.”
You are suddenly and acutely aware of your exposed, barely sticky body. You swallow.
“Hmm.” You reach up behind your head, and your hand grazes over the closest magazine face—Jessica Alba.
“I was like, well thank God I didn’t know her last year.”
He is joking, and he laughs and you laugh, and Thank God he didn’t know you last year.
You can’t be too picky about first boyfriends. Especially when you’ve been the chubby friend in the friend group your whole life, and you never even got asked to Homecoming, let alone out. He is friends with most of your friends, which is convenient for pre-gaming, and actual gaming. He has an affinity for serial-killer themed crime procedurals, which allows for joint Saturday afternoon Netflix binges. He never makes you do anything you aren’t comfortable with, socially or sexually, meaning you can coast for weeks avoiding his shitty friends, and blowjobs. Best of all, he eats breakfast and dinner with the water polo team, and your class schedule precludes you from too frequent lunch dates. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t really seem worth it to tell anyone about him.
It is simply too easy to not eat. Friends have other friends to eat dinner with. You say you had class at noon; no one goes to lunch at eleven. You can last until about six o’clock on an apple and a granola bar, and from there, it’s just about not over-doing dinner so you can burn off the day’s calories at dance team practice, and if needed, on the elliptical after dance team practice. Already by the second day of this, you are trudging up to your third floor dorm room as if you’d been hit by an eighteen-wheeler, and by the end of the week, eating a full meal makes you feel as though you are going to explode. Which is, you know, kind of the goal.
Walking to class with a total of 650 calories consumed in the last forty-eight hours is both a burden and a natural high, due to 1. lightheadedness and 2. an unexpected surge of superiority.
The thing is, no one knows your stomach is practically about to eat itself, that all your internal organs are screaming for nutrients, that even your brain is moving a little bit slower; it took you about twenty five full seconds to remember where the Mediterranean Sea was the other day. They just know that you are thinner; thin. Your friends from freshman year sometimes don’t even recognize you when you wave to them from across the quad.
You almost wish someone would ask you what you had for dinner last night, just so you can say “nothing,” or make up some glaringly obvious lie on the spot. You wander, head fuzzy and body perhaps ironically feeling like it’s made of whatever anvils are made of, into dining halls, on nights you are allowed dinner, complaining to your friend that you all you’ve had to eat today is an apple, as if this is different from any other day.
The simultaneous terror and exhilaration of the possibility of getting caught is only suddenly, quietly dulled when your dad comes to visit, and asks you directly over dinner one night.
“You’re looking really skinny,” he says.
“Thanks,” you say, unconfident that was really a compliment.
“Are you being healthy?” he asks. You laugh, too loud, too loud for the quiet restaurant, and too loud for any sane member of society. This is followed by a wildly exaggerated sarcastic response of:
“No, I’m anorexic.”
You are not entirely sure if you are anorexic. You always thought anorexia meant eating nothing. Or like the Emily Blunt character in The Devil Wears Prada, who didn’t eat until till she felt like she was about to faint, and she ate a cube of cheese. You’ve never had that kind of willpower. When you Googled “Anorexia Nervosa,” you had to look at seven different websites to try and figure out if the definition actually applied to you, and never really did. You were surprised, and then later not, to find that the self-diagnosis/non-diagnosis of anorexia did not affect the way you ate, not in the least.
At Mandatory Dance Team Brunch the day after Halloween, you are found out.
“Julia has a secret boyfriend.”
“What?” All heads turn to you.
“Who?”
You are sitting at the head of the long rectangular table in front of two plates, one piled with scrambled eggs, sausage, tater tots and bacon, the other with one of each flavor of pancakes: chocolate chip, blueberry, and banana, all smothered in butter and drowning in syrup. There is something peculiarly regal about the seating arrangement and the grotesquely indulgent feast in front of you. It is Cheat Day.
“He’s not a secret.” You shrug. Co-captain Hillary explains the story, which you already know, to the table of your twenty-one dance team “sisters,” most of whom probably didn’t know your name before today. He and Hillary had been assigned partners for an econ class group project, and he friend-requested her on Facebook, which she thought was weird, because she uses a fake name and a picture of a lion for her profile picture, so if he could find her, then like, the man could find her, right? So he explained that he found her profile through you, so she was like, oh, how do you know Julia? And he was like oh, we’re dating. And that was the story of the discovery of your betrayal to the members of the dance team.
“How long have you been dating?”
“Um. Like a month I guess.”
The table erupts like a foreign parliament meeting. You will retell this story to your boyfriend later, emphasizing the humiliation, but in this moment, you can’t deny that you also feel a little triumphant, having kept this secret so long.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I don’t know. It never came up.”
The shock and outrage from the table is no shock to you. The first day of practice you were told that this team was “really more like a family,” though all that really meant was that the team got drunk together every other Friday and made you play Never Have I Ever until someone threw up or left to go hook up with their boyfriend.
“Wait, who is it? Do I know him?”
“From now on he will be dubbed Secret Boyfriend,” someone offers.
This gets some possibly (hopefully) sarcastic cackles until Hillary shouts his name above the chorus. The entire dining hall’s mass of voices dims for just a second, and the teammate sisters once again, cackle, until God’s divine grace rescues you from this interrogation; someone else’s Saturday night going-out story takes precedence over secret boyfriends.
You take this opportunity to finally disrupt a divinely crispy mountain of tater tots, which, for a moment, are the only thing in the world. They are the most delightful thing you’ve ever tasted, until you get to the bacon, and then the cheesy eggs, and then the banana pancake, which you have saved for last, like always. If there is any non-weight related advantage to starving yourself, it is that when you do allow yourself to eat, it is the best fucking thing in the world.
You are never asked about Secret Boyfriend again. That’s the thing about secrets: once they’re out, they’re not all that fun anymore.
A week following the discovery of Secret Boyfriend, a Mandatory Team Bonding (read: drinking) is scheduled (in light of recent “tension”, between whom and about what you have no idea).
So tonight you will get drunk, half off vodka and half off hunger, and those two elixirs will swirl in your stomach in such a pleasant and unsettling way, you may end up just chucking up all the vodka anyways.
Two birds, or whatever.
You start the night at Sushi Ship, a sushi restaurant in the shape of a ship, known for cheap sake bombs and poorly performed karaoke, and not sushi. These girls are not even your friends, but you take at least thirty-five pictures with them, and it would seem to anyone with a Facebook account that these girls could be your #sisters.
Sake sake sake. Bomb bomb bomb. You’re woozy after one (another non-weight related advantage: being a cheap drunk).
After three or maybe four, you see a text from Secret Boyfriend.
Hey Beautiful. What are you up to tonight?
You wait until one more sake sake sake, bomb bomb bomb, to respond.
At sushiship with dance girls
Oh! Fun. What your doing afterwards?
Idkkkkkkkkkkk probs goign out with them
Ok. Be careful!
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” you say to no one. When your head snaps up from your phone, you see half the teammate sisters thronged on the bow of the ship, collectively yelling Hit Me Baby One More Time at one, unfortunate microphone.
The boat starts to rock against waves of sake.
“Are you okay with this?” You don’t remember how you got here, but you’re in a strange boy’s room in a senior dorm and Hillary is looking at you and holding a shot glass and moving her mouth.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” You’re already nodding. Does she really think you’re that much of a square, that you need this much reassurance to do a shot?
She’s not convinced, but she gives you a shot anyway.
“Jules, look me in the eye.” You do—no one calls you Jules—but you notice in this moment that you cannot look into both of her eyes with both of your eyes, and you have to choose one. You use both your eyes to look into her right eye and feel that you choose the wrong one.
“Repeat after me,” she says. “‘I am a fucking boss.’”
“I am a fucking boss.”
She nods and takes her shot, and you take yours.
Wait, how many shots have we done? This you thought you asked out loud.
Six hours later you wake up, remove your sweatpants, and press your feet onto your scale. You expect a disaster; you are the lightest you ever remember weighing. You spend the next fifteen minutes turning at slight angles in front of your full-length mirror, looking for bones.
You can’t find your phone anywhere, on your nightstand or under your bed or somewhere in between the folds of your duvet, where it usually is. You thrash your duvet around, which is when it would normally clatter against your bedposts, and then the floor. But you hear nothing.
It is no great loss, for now. This is the time of day group-text brunch plans are proposed, deliberated, and finally reluctantly agreed upon, but you are too nauseous to eat anything today anyway.
Around three in the afternoon, you get a Facebook message from a boy you are not Facebook friends with.
Nathan Walters: Hey, looks like you left your phone here. Let me know if you wanna come pick it up, I’m around. Greenblatt 245.
A pain shoots through your head and your chest at the same time; it’s unclear whether this is hangover-related or Nathan Walters related, or both. You’ve blacked out before, but never like this. Now that you’re thinking about it, you don’t even remember how you got home last night.
Nathan Walters, 14 mutual friends, mostly dance team girls. Profile pictures: Shirtless Nathan on a boat with a large, cut-up fish (ew), clothed Nathan with a Nerf gun (yikes), and another shirtless Nathan with a big group of drunk people standing on a dock on a lake (hmm).
After your dinner of throwing up in the cafeteria bathroom and a half a can of Sprite, you meet Nathan Walters in Greenblatt 245, who is still (!!) shirtless. Your entire body is shaking slightly, definitely both hangover-related and Nathan Walters related.
Nathan Walters has failed to mention there is a crack down the middle of your phone screen. It does not preclude you from seeing four missed calls from Secret Boyfriend.
“Yeah, he called a bunch,” Nathan Walters says.
“How did this happen?” You show him the screen. He does that thing that shirtless boys do, where they kind of smirk and scoff at the same time.
“You don’t remember?”
It is only when you are walking back home, shaking not-so-slightly, that you remember Nathan Walters. A handful of snapshots flood your head, as if they all happened at the same time: you’re in a strange boy’s room, you’re holding a strange boy’s hand as you run past Hillary, who is both laughing with you and watching you, you’re falling sideways, half on purpose and half because your body can’t hold you up anymore, onto a strange boy’s bed, which is, thank Jesus, surrounded by empty walls.
Nathan Walters presses a finger down the curve of your spine and tells you you are too skinny. Face down on the twin bed, you shake your head against the sheets, those plaid and kind of scratchy sheets that only twenty-two year old boys would buy, and the plaid blurs into your eyelashes blurs into your eyeliner blurs into your eyes.
You’re stopped, completely frozen in the middle of the sidewalk; people brush past you and probably look at you, until you can pick up your deadweight legs again; you’re blinking your eyes open and closed, shaking your head against remembering. Your phone buzzes angrily in your pocket; Secret Boyfriend is calling again. Perhaps you’ve already been found out, again, and it is strangely relieving. The screen fades to black, split down the middle. This you still can’t remember, and don’t bother trying. There are some things better kept as secrets, even to yourself.
You pass a reflective window of the biology building, and for a second, you swear you don’t even recognize yourself. Glancing back once more, you see cheekbones and collarbones and etiolated skin, you could be one of those girls on one of those blogs, maybe. It is the best day in recent memory.
