It is impossible to fold a standard-sized piece of paper in half more than seven times.

My fourth-grade class and I tested this theory one day, pouring our way back into the classroom from recess, glistening in briny sweat to find a small stack of white, crisp, A4 printer paper at each of our desks. Our fingers lacked rhythm and sync as they gripped the fragile corners recklessly, all overtly desperate to constrict the flattened matter into the tiniest speck our adolescent hands could get it to be. The first four folds were easy, though, after the fifth, our typical child-like confidence began to dwindle as the material thickened, and our young fingers struggled to manipulate it. Hands that had not existed a decade prior were frustrated at their inability to conquer science, with minutes of creasing and compressing resulting in angry sighs and twenty-one clumps of wrinkled, fist-sized parchment. Every failed attempt I got at, I tried again, unfolding my paper to unveil a grid of slanted lines, each tracing down the surface to tell an overt story of trial and error.

This memory resurfaced from the depths of my cavern-like mind on the morning of my birthday. I recalled being the size of my family’s living room stool, anxiously marveling at the feelings of serotonin injected into my veins by the freedom of my future. I daydreamed of mom and dad letting me take a bright red taxi alone and flicking a wand of jet-black mascara along my lashes free of admonishment. I daydreamed of dancing underneath the shallow street lights past my curfew and being tickled on my tongue from big gulps of Sprite. I daydreamed of how magnificent it would be to know more about the world, to have control of my body, mind, and spirit. And yet, here I sat at fourteen in the corner of my father’s favorite leather couch, legs tucked in until they touched my chest, shoulders slumped over until my chin rested helplessly on my knees. I was, at this moment, the most pathetic birthday girl in the whole world. My cheeks began to shift into a dark pink hue from the heat of the August sun, and I watched as the light injected itself into the dust floating past. My heart was left ringing out of my chest, so incredibly fast and hard that I was surprised it was not knocking the particles off their course, but instead, left them trailing along after one another as if they were dancing in a waltz. It was not the sound of my heartbeat that I hated-rather the volume at which it announced itself to the deafening atmosphere in which I grew present. I suddenly longed for the careless mindset I once possessed, free of insecurity and negligence of my very own appearance. I had become so concealed to myself, so inexplicably aloof even within the perimeter of my own body that I hardly existed at all.

And so, I made my way back to the shower once more.

What seemed like a mild case of germaphobia to outsiders was a tiny encapsulation of my most vulnerable moments. Emulsifying the pink goop of grapefruit body wash that jiggled through the gaps between my fingertips, my mind once again fell silent under the rhythmic taps of water. This marked my fourth shower that morning, drenching my head’s dead ends once more with water and shampoo only for it to sparse out again like hay when dried. I stood there in the booth silently, my body barely managing to hold itself up as hot droplets burned my skin before slipping down my back with ease. It had begun with the first fold; the destruction of anonymity.

Living in the new norm of a worldwide illness, my mind sparked with joy at the idea of unveiling my concealed features that lived far too long underneath a mask without greeting. I had spent so much time trapped inside the confinements of my own expressions and limitations that being able to reveal something as unadorned as my own bare complexion felt nothing short of electrifying. As I unhooked the strings that hung around my ears and pulled the obstructing piece of cloth away from the surface, I expected to be greeted with the unspoken warmth of transparency that I lacked for so long and took for granted.

The whispers caught up to me instead.

It traveled like shrieks on a ruined violin, zipping through crowds of gossip with stealth before piercing my own eardrums with intense malice. Just a second before, I had gone about my life without a single doubt about myself, and now, suddenly, my cheeks were a little too plump, teeth a little too crooked, eyebrows a little too sparse for others. Suddenly, the short glances and repulsive expressions shot at my bare face were enough to signal that my complete complexion attracted confusion as I did not turn out the way many expected me to. Suddenly, I had become too utterly unattractive to present myself as an authentic individual. And suddenly, for the first time in my life, I felt insufficient.

I began to eat less after that, cursed by the murmurs of the whispers that slipped inside my mind. Food no longer remained a pleasure or a blessing, but rather evil confinement that taunted my head every waking day. I longed to fix myself, morph, and be folded in half until my figure mimicked that of a hand on a ticking clock. I spent hours alone wandering the magazine aisle of the school library, scanning each and every title for answers to shed the flubber that hung from my loose sides and cheekbones. I had dismissed my friends’ concerns about my weight loss addiction as my mother’s desire to try healthier alternatives for junk food when in reality, I had wished they still stopped me. But despite all of my attempts to find a solution that successfully contracted my body into a denser, more compact form, nothing seemed to be permanent. Hopeless, my guts knotted and rumbled at my defeat. But it wasn’t until I turned the corner on my way out that I discovered Vogue’s cover girls and supermodel-rated diets.

Soon enough, this fanciful city of skinny legs and twenty-three-inched waists slowly became my compulsion. With every flip of a page, I had constructed a routine of traveling back for visits in hopes to eventually, one day, reside and stay forever. But like clockwork, or magic, or some cruel joke played on me by a God that I have abandoned, a bleeding cut of darkness stretches across the sky whenever I arrive. This land sees weeks of sunshine on end, but I show up, and it storms, a circumstance on the border between poetic convenience and overused cliche. Thin and ever-present, the diffidence lived like a vein inside some inconspicuous piece of earth. Cracked me open, held me up to the light, and you would have found it hiding there. On the more challenging days, I could feel the topography of my face change. I knew that trees in unobserved forests still cry out as their trunks string apart, but no one told me about the sound the city makes as I cross its threshold. It does not cease to exist when I am gone; if anything-it lives even louder.

“You could belong here,” it taunts. “If you really, truly tried.”

Although I managed to cast myself out into orbit every once in a while, above the atmosphere and away from the willowy fumes that kept me so intoxicated, every time I watched the earth
spin, gravity called out my name and sucked me in once more, folding me in half again, creasing more lines into my crinkled paper.

Stung with discomfort by the reminiscence of my former habits, I began to quicken my hand’s pace with frustration, and soon enough, the once transparent, coral-colored blob began to thicken and foam up in size. I was feeling my body folding up in half, then half, then half again, until I was the smallest I had ever been, until I had been creased and compressed to my most stubborn and static self. A part of me stood in the booth in hopes that with every trip back would come an opportunity to perfect without the overflow or withdrawal, that with every scrub of a sponge would roll off the dead skin cells along with the ugliness that remained behind. I grew hopeful that once I wiped away the steam from the bathroom mirror to reveal my drenched figure, skin red and irritated from the scrubbing and the heat, I would look different, that I would be satisfied with what I saw in front of me, and that my urge to run away would finally roll to a stop.

But it never did.

And so, for several days, weeks, months, I found my way back to the shower every couple of hours with a desire to be creased and compressed into the impossible eighth fold.

I have been here a million times before, each time an exact replica of the other. Each time, I slow the spouting water to a stop with a turn of the knob and step out onto the bath mat to face the enemy reflecting back at me above the sink. Most girls wished for Sephora gift cards and vanilla-scented candles for their birthday, but all I ever wanted was my sanity back. I used to think that by the age of eight, I would enjoy the presence of maturity. Eight turned to ten, then twelve, and now, here I am, in a body that, every year on this day, swaps itself out for something older, something more used, and simultaneously, more ambivalent. I became uncomfortably conscious that if I did not stop now, if I allowed my untamed addiction to get out of hand and consume my life, the last little bit of tangible love my inner child possessed would die. And so, using the tip of my pointer finger, I outlined and shaded a heart around the perimeter of my face against the fogged-up mirror, enabling me to see myself in my most vulnerable form. I didn’t fight my opponent today, but instead, compromised with her. Staring back at a stranger, it was at this moment I remembered that my emotions are only so large. That all of this, all that I am, can fit inside the palm of a nine-year-old. I remembered being here before, at the bottom of this cycle, the end of this exhale, the center of the seed inside my pit. I remembered the overwhelming defeat I felt that day in fourth grade at my desk, clutching the idea of an impossible expectation that grew on me with slick hasten and wishing I could do more with it. But I remembered restarting, reversing my process, and walking back to square one, recovering from these subtle implosions and building back from condensed catastrophes to unravel, unfold, and open up again. Although my page had deteriorated into nothing but a fragile lump of mush, each crack and crevice that creased into the paper mapped out a story of self-love and acceptance. Every so often, I find my way back to the decayed wad, tracing its cracks and edges until my fingernail has lined every single cut that ever folded me in half. I reroot my journey, meticulously pulling apart the crumbs and loose trimmings until it expands into one, until the tightly-compacted crinkles untuck and unfold.

Until I am a whole again.