Mems Part 1

I was eight when I decided to be thin. 

By this time, my town had already died and was beginning to decay. One of two large factories had closed, and people were escaping in hoards. My family stayed because my father was a teacher. Lucky us.

I lived in New York, but nowhere, really; a heavy-aired valley drowning in its own excremental offspring. It wasn’t the city. Not the gorgeous suburbs or the Adirondack Mountains. Not a place where celebrities went to rehab. North of that. The Northernmost tip of our glorious Empire state.

I could see Canada from my grandmother’s house. It took less than ten minutes to get to the border. Think–North.

Winter lasted from late October to early April. More than five months of winter, and people were heavy. But not me. Not us kids. We were scrappy and cold-nosed and tightly bound. There weren’t many of us and so we clung together like sisters. I was closer to them than my own sister–the friends who I would eat dirt with and hide beside for hours in the dark.

We lived on a hill that you could go straight down and end up at the top without turning around. We could lay in the middle of the road for an hour without getting nervous.

When I was eight, I learned what a calorie was. I learned to read the labels. I started turning the box of gogurts in the freezer around so I saw numbers instead of food. After school, I stopped eating after one mini muffin. That was enough.

I learned how to wrap my left hand around my waist to measure myself. I learned how to hold my left bicep with my right hand to gage its thickness. I started only looking in the mirror sideways.

Less was fine for me. I didn’t need that much–less than my sister, certainly. Especially because she was so smart and pretty and athletic and preferred by everyone who seemed to matter to me. I didn’t need as much as she did. I could be small and thin and she could have all those other things.

When I was eight I decided to be thin. And it was an incredibly successful distraction for so, so many years–

When I was eight I realized that when I died, it would be like a dreamless sleep. That this would be forever.

Under the covers, I imagined all the ways my body might give up. I saw myself peeking–somehow lucid–from my grave, watching the world fade to the insides of my eyelids. To nothing.

I was scared, dear reader. And I didn’t know how to live with that. So I did the only thing that I knew with absolute certainty I could control.

We find the things that soothe us and we hold on tightly. Without grueling adaptation, a lot of help, or perhaps rock bottom, we hold on until the bitter end. These things look a lot like sickness–they become disease. It is the clinging, the rigidity with which we hold our vices above our values that can lead us down these very scary roads.

Fear, it’s usually fear of something.

So, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk openly and often about fear. About death. About our bodies. About what it is that makes us want to numb–to hide.

Tell me what you’re afraid of, dear reader. I promise to do the same.