My 13 year old self use to think restrooms were just for using the potty and woman [painting pretty false faces on themselves. But I soon learned that it’s a secret shrine. Place teenage girls enter to make themselves feel fine, when in fact I never do. I flee to the bathrooms stalls, fall to my knees and recall every ounce of nutrients from my body.
But it’s still not enough. The skinny gods don’t accept this pathetic offering, when I still have 110 pounds of fat on my bones to offer and this alone will never do. I must give my mind to them, allow their whispers to twine around my brain. Make me go insane, and cause eating to fill me with shame.
I remember when I was a real girl. 12 years old with smiles unfurling upon my face every day and food resting comfortably in my stomach, like a baby in the womb. Warm and loved. But I crossed the borderland that summer and became frozen. Not dead, but not alive. I allowed shadows and ghosts to curl themselves around my frame, seeping into my marrow and eating me from the inside out.
I am hollowed out and transparent. Filled with acid and syrupy thick blood that barely pumps itself through my skeleton limbs. The mirror tells me I’m fat, shows me an image of a bloated girl, and the scale agrees. They murmur to each other in hushed tones: “look at her try.” “She’ll never be good enough, be thin enough.”Their words rub against me like rough bark, leaving invisible cuts and bruises on my fleshy skeleton frame.
I flee to my best friend, the toilet, and force myself into repentance. The muffin, the banana, the tea, and the gallon of water… it all appears before me and is gracefully taken. Yet, the guilt cannot be shaken. Tired and empty, I leave my shrine behind for the night and walk into the shadows and ghosts who haunt me in my never ending nightmare; maybe I’ll be skinnier tomorrow.