Because you are nice to your grandfather, he likes you best. You let him be your Grandpa while your mother stands guard. You think you might be hurting her feelings by trying to love Grandpa, and you think he might detect your nervousness around him, and be hurt as well. You feel like you should enjoy visiting your grandparents, but you don’t. It makes you sad in a way you don’t yet have words for.

You start to have the only recurring dream you will ever know:

You are in your holiday best at your grandparents’ table. You and your sister look at each other from across the table, and there is a bowl of vanilla ice cream at each of your place-settings. Your eye-level view reveals the torsos of grown-ups passing through your field of vision. You feel yourself being watched.

In the dream, you take your spoon, scoop a reasonable mouthful of vanilla ice cream, and bring it to your mouth. But when the spoon reaches your mouth, the ice cream vanishes. You try repeatedly to feed yourself, but the ice cream disappears time and time again. You get increasingly frustrated and afraid. Across the table, your sister eats her ice cream and giggles.

You are ten years old, and in school. You’ve long since noticed that many things come easier for you than they do for most of your classmates. You are not ashamed of this, but you notice that your peers, the ones in your math and reading groups, are not very nice to the kids who have trouble figuring things out.

This horrifies you, and you become terrified that you are as mean as the other “smart kids” in your class. You go out of your way to prove that you don’t think you’re better than anyone else just because you can read long sentences without stopping and can draw horses and faces. You give away toys and snacks because it makes you happy, you introduce yourself to the new kids because you wonder what it must be like to be them, and you think they’re fascinating. You have many friends, but you don’t say very much.

Your playmates begin to tell you, “You’re too nice, Kelly.” “You ‘feel bad’ for everything.” You will hear this for most of your life.

They can’t know how confusing that is. What does a person do when she is “too nice?” Is that a bad thing? Does she change? You are always sorry.

You like to stay inside at recess while everyone else goes out to play. You have little interest in kickball or tag, and you think it’s heaven to have the dim classroom to yourself. You rifle through the clay and the crayons, and you make things while your classmates run in the sunshine. You like this. It is yours.

You are in the hell that is middle school. You have always known that you are not as pretty as you could be, but it has only now started to bother you that your hair is not silky no matter how you torture it, and that your eyes always look vaguely sad no matter how much strip-mall-glop you lacquer on their lids. You have read about “adolescence” and the “pre-teen” years, and you had expected them to be more confusing than they are turning out to be. You regard objectively that you are not a horrible person, but you are far from ideal. You have been educated about this “phase,” though, so you feel reasonably prepared.

You begin to pore over Teen Magazine for hair tips, boy tips, and make-up tips. You notice that your body is not what it should be, based on the pictures in the magazine. (You definitely haven’t yet read “The Beauty Myth.”) You begin to do calisthenics and examine your body very closely in the mirror.

The best are the days when your mother isn’t home when you return from school, and you can have one more cookie than usual.

You are sixteen years old, at the prom with a boy one year older than you. One day in the future, you will realize that you look very pretty at this moment. You are in a simple, slim-fitting, sparkling green dress, and silver sandals for which you searched in every mall in the state. The boy you are with is thrilled. He is dancing and glowing; he opens doors for you and brings you flowers.

You? You are hungry. You are afraid of this boy who seems to like you so much. You don’t understand why he’s doing this.

These days, you remember everything you’ve eaten with frightening clarity. You eat chicken at the prom. You even have a mouthful of the dessert, justifying its consumption with the fact that you will be dancing all night, and you had gone for a run that afternoon. One bite is OK as long as you’re very good for the rest of the week. You are hungry.

To your afternoon calisthenics has been added a three to five mile run, OR ELSE. From your daily food intake has been subtracted everything but dry toast and black coffee for breakfast, an apple for lunch (you give away the sandwich which you put in your bag to appease your mother), and however little dinner you can get away with eating without causing your parents to raise an eyebrow. You are terrified of fat, and of anything that could make you gain weight.

You are famous among your friends for your willpower. You are lovingly teased for your methodical consumption of your daily Granny Smith apple at lunch. You eat the apples slowly, stripping off the skin with your teeth, then peeling away one miniscule layer after another of the flesh, maintaining the apple’s symmetry. When the fruit is gone, you devour the core.

Your friends think it’s because you’re quirky; you know it’s because you’re ravenous.

You save the Quality Control stickers from your apples and put them on your locker. Throughout high school, your friends can always recognize your locker as the one liberally freckled with little Granny Smith stickers.

People still tell you you’re too nice. You hate yourself. You are desperate for autonomy, but terrified of hurting anyone’s feelings by pushing them away too obviously. You are convinced that you are worthless and no one will ever love you, and you don’t know where these feelings come from. You figure that they’re based in truth, and no one would know these things better than you.

Success is a new low weight. Success is needing to hold on to the wall when you pass from class to class. Success is preventing anyone from noticing you shudder and panic when your mother serves a cheesy casserole for a meal. Success is making plans with friends that will keep you out of the house during dinner. Success is hearing your stomach rumble when you try to sleep.

You are so healthy. You are so in control.

You are twenty years old, and in college. You have put on some weight since high school, and you hate it. You look back on those “crazy” days of dieting and hunger with a mixture of contempt and jealousy. You swear you can lose weight without resorting to the extremes of previous years, and you wonder how you used to do it. You’re glad that your neuroses never became serious enough to really affect you, or so you think.

You search yourself for a shred of the former craziness, to get you back down to your old weight, your true self. You are learning about yourself. You are learning that you’re funny, that the things you say are sometimes interesting to people, and that you’re the kind of person you might like to hang out with. You still don’t talk much, but it’s because your words are select, not because you’re afraid of them. Still, you long for your craziness.

You spend a semester studying in London. The first people you meet are fellow American students, and you can’t understand why you can’t find a single way to relate to them. They talk for hours about their cell phones and hairstyles, and they put up with you. You are far from home, and terribly excited, but lonely. You’ve never had trouble making friends before, and you don’t know why these people go out of their way to snub you.

You begin to binge and purge. You had tried it before, but found it awkward and inconvenient. You took this opportunity as a stranger in a strange land to become as alone as possible. Fuck them. You are all-powerful. Fuck them. This is yours.

The semester goes on, and you do make friends. But you have found an anger, and you’ve found a way to make yourself invincible and untouchable. You learn all the tricks, all the right bathrooms and the right foods, to facilitate the purge. Every time you do it, you feel exhilarated, and you think fuck them fuck them fuck them until their faces disappear and you forget who they are. You know you’re being overdramatic, that you are not persecuted, that this is not healthy, but fuck that. Fuck you.

You are twenty five years old. You are in the office. You are on the sidewalk. You are on the train. You find yourself in and out of tears whenever you are alone. You can’t pinpoint what is eating your physical and mental energy, but you feel empty and depleted and selfish.

You are on the train, and you notice that many of your fellow passengers have black smudges on their foreheads. You wonder why, until you remember that it’s Ash Wednesday. You wonder what they’re giving up for Lent.

You go home and look at old photographs of yourself.

* * *

You see the little girl in her Thanksgiving finery. You wish you could put her on your lap and tell her, It’s not your fault. When people are angry, it’s not always your fault.

You wonder if she’d understand that. She’d probably see how sad you were, and she’d apologize without knowing why.

* * *

You want to tell the little girl in the classroom how motherfucking cool it is if she wants to stay inside and draw. You want to congratulate her for taking time for herself. You desperately want to warn her not to depend too much on it, and not to forego the sunshine and companionship altogether.

* * *

You want to sit with the 6th grader and explain to her the concept of “The Beauty Myth.” She’d get it. She might be more wary of how her Teen Magazines affected her, but she’d still sneak a comforting cookie when no one was watching.

* * *

You long to step into the photo of the pretty 16-year-old and her prom date. You wish you could shake her and tell her to stop being such a blind, arrogant idiot … Who do you think you’re fooling? Don’t you realize how pretty you are? Stop lying to yourself, you fuck-up! Somewhere in your head, something is telling you that this is not right. I’ve heard it.

You want to spin her around to face her prom date and scream in her ear, This boy is ready to love you. He has put his heart in your teeth. Don’t you realize that? Of course you’re scared, but how the hell do you think he feels?

You wonder about the girl’s prom date. You wonder if he has any idea that, in retrospect, she regards him as the first of many that “got away.” He was far more patient with her than she deserved, and then he finally gave up. You wish he knew that she’s aware of what she might have missed.

You want to yell at her and slap her. You want to beg her. You know, however, that none of this would work. She would regard you angrily and with disgust.

If she were to recognize you in your current body, she would either implode with revulsion or jump in front of a train so she could avoid the ignoble fate of being heavy and alive. It occurs to you that she hates you more than you could ever hate her. A part of you misses her terribly.

If you were to face her again, you would not be angry. You would hold her until she stopped resisting your embrace. You would stroke her hair and whisper Stop now, darling. Just breathe.

Thinking about it makes you cry. You wish she would let you forgive her.

* * *

To the college girl, you don’t have much to say. You look at each other civilly and with interest. She recognizes you, and you her. You both know exactly what she’s doing to herself. You think she might like to be held, but she doesn’t let on. Really, it’s OK with her either way. She’s found a way of coping with loneliness, but she knows it’s a quick fix.

“See you later,” she says. She likes you.

* * *

Lately, you’ve been waking up with a heavy sadness in your stomach. You’ve always felt your emotions in your stomach first, as a weight or an electricity that pulls or pushes on the rest of you from the center of your belly. Sometimes these feelings start in your heart or your head, but they eventually slide down to your stomach and stay there. You wonder if everyone’s emotions pool in the same place.

You don’t want to greet the morning with a weight of sadness in your stomach. It makes you tired.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

One-Armed Paper Hanger Earns her Wings - 07.29.05

Sugar & Lemon - 07.28.05

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