I met you early in life.
I was just a girl. Just a girl looking for life. Just a girl looking for perfect. Just the right kind of girl for you.
You whispered your lies in my ear one night when a crack split right down the middle of our family.
Make him love you, you said.
Make him come back, you said.
Make him choose you, you said.
I did not know then that there is no easy answer for divorce. So I took your hand.
I skipped lunch that first day, sat out by the picnic tables with those friends who always brought their lunches so I didn’t have to smell the chicken noodle soup and cheese sticks inside the cafeteria. I forgot mine, I’d say when they asked.
The truth is, I was poor enough to qualify for free cafeteria lunches, poor enough not to have much in the refrigerator at home to even pack. But they didn’t know that.
They’d offer to share theirs, because we were all trying to attain the best body, even then, and maybe if we all ate the same thing one of us would not be skinnier than another.
No thanks, I’d say.
I was only 11, back from a year spent in a state 1,000 miles away from my home one, and now we were home again, except it was all different, all broken, because it was middle school where looks mattered, and there was no dad telling me I was beautiful, as is.
Would I have believed him anyway? I don’t know.
What I do know is that you made it easy to believe you. And once I did, you had me.
Our love affair began slow, with a stomach rumbling over lunch. But a stomach gets used to the hole after a while, and it didn’t take long before it just stopped talking about the better way I pretended didn’t exist.
You moved into the empty space. You gave me three years of skipped lunch, and then there was high school and early morning volleyball practice, and you threw out that innocent question: You don’t really feel like eating in the morning after those intense practices, do you? Wasting all those calories you worked off?
I started “forgetting” my breakfast at home.
There came a day, an early-morning tournament day, when a coach brought homemade monkey bread to give us an extra boost. I could smell the honey and the cinnamon, and it was all the things I loved most. She handed everyone a plate. All my teammates ate while I excused myself, left my plate on a counter and sat on the toilet until I was sure they’d all finished and I could pretend I’d forgotten where I’d set down my plate.
No one even noticed.
It was really too easy.
I had energy reserves. I told them eating right after an intense workout made me sick. I told them eating right before an intense workout—like the 12:30 p.m. athletics class—would make me sick.
I was sick. But no one knew about you.
Mostly because my mother saw me eat. My friends saw me missing. I didn’t waste away, because there was still dinner, however small it was. You and I covered all the necessary bases.
After graduation, when those stories started rolling in about the Freshman Fifteen, the extra pounds most freshmen come home with after their first year of college, my heart thrashed.
Don’t worry, you said. We won’t let that happen.
And we didn’t. Because college meant fewer eyes watching for when I should eat. It meant abnormal (or nonexistent) eating hours. It meant freedom to hold your hand and run away.
“Two hundred meals will be enough, right?” my mother said. “Two hundred fifty?”
“Two hundred will be fine,” I said.
I ended that semester with one hundred seventy-three meals left on my student ID card.
Mostly because you fascinated me. I enjoyed the me you carved from who I had been. The thin legs that had always been a little thigh-heavy. The arms that had always been a little tricep-flabby. The chin that was never as defined as I wanted it to be.
The new me was almost just a little bit maybe pretty.
So I let you keep doing your work. And when my college roommate noticed all my clothes sagging and dragged me to the cafeteria with her and the girl across the hall, I let your sister slip in for a time. We conducted our clandestine affair in the dorm bathroom, where I’d get rid of the chocolate cake and the mint chocolate chip ice cream and the pepperoni pizza and the enchilada casserole and the mashed potatoes with brown gravy and the buttered hot rolls with a stick of a finger or the swallow of a pill, even the night that cute baseball player came looking for me and I forgot my toothbrush.
That year ended and I came home not only without the Freshman Fifteen but without another twenty-five. I looked good. So I cut ties with you for a while, mostly because I lived with my grandmother that summer, and she cooked for me every night when I got home from my city job. I felt guilty not eating. And I couldn’t purge, because the living room was right next to the bathroom, and she would hear. She was smart enough to know. I could see it by the way she looked at me.
A year, two, three passed, and then you came back ready to play the summer before I got married.
I didn’t give up eating completely, because I was more interested in health this time around, but that interest in health didn’t stop me from packing my lunch of one cucumber and calling myself satisfied at the end of it.
“That all you eat for lunch?” a coworker once asked.
“I eat a big breakfast,” I said. Eight large strawberries was a big breakfast, in my book.
And then came marriage to a man who actually cared whether or not I ate and you and I lost touch for a time. You came to visit sporadically over the years, after the first baby, when I was appalled that my body did not immediately shrink back to its former acceptable proportions; after the third in four years, when baby weight stacked itself like it was going to stay.
After this last one and a broken foot.
It happens quickly, that sliding back into your arms.
I told myself it wasn’t going to matter this time. I told myself I would be unaffected. I told myself I was better than you.
And yet the six-week scale told a story I didn’t want to read, and those weeks after the weighing with a broken foot and a walking cast that made burning calories next to impossible I found myself skipping lunch because “I forgot” or because “the kids eat so early and I’m just not hungry when they eat” or because “I’m working and can’t really spare the time right this minute…”
Because “…”
So this last week I scheduled time to eat, and I ate. You looked on. You sneered. You shook your head. You pointed out the pooch. You laughed at my legs. You reminded me of the scale number.
But I ate.
You have been in and out of my years, whispering your untruths, pointing to your solutions that aren’t really solutions at all, luring me in.
Making me stronger.
Because, you see, every time I look you in the eye and say, “No. You cannot have me today” is another day I grow stronger. You didn’t count on this.
I don’t know how many times you will visit me in my lifetime.
I don’t know if I will ever look in a mirror and completely like—or love—what I see.
I don’t know.
But there is something I do know: You will not win.
I am stronger than I used to be when you came knocking. You don’t look quite so attractive anymore. Or fascinating. Or worthwhile.
Keep trying (I know you will), and I will keep saying no.
No.
NO.
For as long as it takes.
