By: Reily Bai
Art by: Raegan Boettcher
Content warning: references to disordered eating
I am young and burnt on the skin,
I look a little charred from the sun. Me and my two sisters, we all are.
We are young and we practically live outside in the summer.
The pool; I am diving on the sides and flipping off the boards and speedwalking
on the deck, I am an elastic band. The day is warm but the pool is not.
My fingers turn blue and wrinkly.
Our dad tells me if I swim some laps, I’ll warm up. I don’t know
that my dad is not cold because he is a bigger person. Maybe
he doesn’t remember what it was like to be withy and thin himself.
Skin on bones. I am shivering and my teeth rattle on each other. I like the sound
they make as they click, clack,
click clack.
We are home, I am in our cul-de-sac
rollerblading
then on a scooter
and then a bike.
We like to go fast down our driveway and I like to win. I win often.
At night, we are chasing fireflies. I watch them glow and fade and glow and fade.
We drop them
into our crinkly plastic water bottle with the label ripped off. Most of the time
we let them go.
I don’t ever sit still. I am on a big blue yoga ball at dinner. My family of five
is seated around our rickety wooden oval table.
I bounce, bounce, bounce
with my porcelain bowl in hand. It has small chips along the mouth,
black rings on the inside. I like our metal spoons with the parallel ridges. The cool metal is tasteless, the cool metal tastes of home.
When there is no ball, I stand up and I pace around our house in circles. From the table to the kitchen area to a study room to the front door with the big carpeted stairs past the small hidden bathroom back to the kitchen.
Round and round; whale in a tank. That is what it is like when you are skin on bones.
My mom and dad scoop three servings worth of food into my bowl. Rice, chicken, lettuce. Udon, beef, broccoli. Glass noodles and fish and eggplant and tofu and beans and spinach and potatoes and mushrooms and pork rib and duck and hotpot,
and I am skin on bones.
“I’m fuuuuulll,” I whine but my mom and dad make me sit until I finish my entire bowl. We don’t toss food in this house.
I don’t know what it means when I’m with two friends at a sports banquet,
they speak of cookies. We’re walking on the grass with our paper plates,
one says, “I can’t eat another cookie because I already had one.” The other agrees.
I think, just have another cookie?
I probably ate three cookies that evening. Probably more. It doesn’t matter to me,
always skin on bones.
I don’t know what food really means until I come to college, when I look at a nutrition label for the first time. Why are there so many “added sugars” and what foods have protein?
Or maybe it was earlier, I just never realized. When the pre-pubescent six pack
on my burnt skin sank back into my body.
And so I learned what it feels like to carry weight that keeps you glued to the ground. I pinch the skin circling my waist or maybe it is fat. Hoola hoop. Once I tried
to hoola hoop and play the piano at the same time. The white mark is still on the piano. I want the hoop off now.
When I sit I feel it fold over itself like origami except it’s flabby. I wonder
if this is what it means to be a woman. Aphrodite, soft at the edges. But I turn
to Achilles. Envy. Glorious, golden strength.
I learn what it feels like to be skiing and afraid of flying too high. I remember,
I used to dream of lifting off. There was never “too fast.” I miss skin and bones.
I know what it feels like to be out of breath running now, to not be
taut like a rope, to be conscious of what you’re eating, to miss
home cooked food, to start using a knife to create a massacre of severed food,
on your plate, to figure out food.
I used to be half an hour late to dinners. My mom yelled at me,
my two sisters love food and our parents said, “Why can’t you be like your sisters?
Eat, eat!” I used to eat because I was told to but now I get it.
I get it and I get why my friend said she couldn’t have the cookie.
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