It's Never Over

(the indomitable desire to be thin)

There’s a layover in Munich and I’m eating a bagel and staring at the back of a pair of legs. I’m slouched with a hoodie pulled up over the fat that naturally collects at the base of one’s chin in such a posture. I cover up despite the fact that everyone in this airport is a stranger, that even if they were to insult me on the basis of my ugly fat chin it would be in a language I don’t understand. My boyfriend who loves me and my chin(s) is staring out the window unbothered and bopping in his headphones to a track he picked up from the Berlin disco last night. But I am staring at the legs.

They’re great — perfect really, which is of course to say slender. They meet a round butt at the top. I feel like a voyeur and keep looking because her back is turned and because she’d probably do it to me if I was in her place. Her waist tucks in just right before her shape forgives slightly into what are probably soft, supple breasts (though I can’t tell, being behind her). I think what I am feeling might be “rage in my solar plexus” which is a term I learned a few nights ago from an Instagram wellness coach. I feel this most times I have extended proximity to women under 120 pounds. The legs again, I look down. Then, the legs turn to face my direction, revealing with them the face of a girl who is — at most — twelve years old. I excuse myself to the bathroom where I lean over the toilet and feel sick for several minutes.

*

When I first got to Los Angeles, I saw a chiropractor who I loved. He was domineering and sexy, tut-tutting at my imbalanced sacrum and always enlightening me on the importance of arugula (“and hamburger patties, you need to be eating things like that, grass-fed beef and scallops, SCALLOPS!” he would clap, “and just gin and soda water if you’re out, if you must, but of course you must because you’re young.”)

I walked laps around the plainly boring Silverlake Reservoir (sorry if you like it there, but the water is stuck behind a cage) and convinced myself that I was breaking out less, told all my friends, “I’m actually breaking out less, now that I’m not eating bread,” while staring at the brioche in the center of the table and manically cutting through my hamburger patty while it is all alone in my plate splattering blood to the edges of it, slipping just under my knife.

I liked believing things like “all pain is inflammation.” How comforting is that? Like all intangible horror is actually real and finite — distinguishable in all its forms, easily solved by spirulina, by Vitamin D and no french fries. “All pain is inflammation,” I would think, as I put arugula in the blender and felt pain. As I snuck a glance at myself in a shop window and felt pain. As I thought about a friend who had died and felt pain. A gua sha could maybe help with this. All this puffiness, all this pain. Maybe it’s a lymph node issue.

*

Listening to “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” by Jeff Buckley and sobbing to the line “it’s never over,” not in a breakup way, but in the way that I have never spent a day of my waking life without wanting to be smaller than I am right now.

I’m scrolling through my algorithmically recommended weight-loss content. I do not “like” or “save” these kinds of things out of principle, but the machine knows that I cannot look away. There’s transformations (my favorite), workout videos made by people who seem genuinely passionate about fitness (also up there, because what the fuck), what-I-eat-in-a-days (patently dangerous and mostly avoided at this point in my life) and, of course, the encouragement video. When you feel like giving up, don’t. Don’t worry about backsliding on your weight loss journey. You can always start again. You can always be brand new.

They look so sad on the stairmaster and on the rowing machine and in the kitchen looking at the cutting board. You can always start again. You are always starting again.

*

I fall down the wellness rabbit hole again — cycle syncing, circadian rhythms. I make a ginger carrot soup and a peppermint tea before bed and I turn off my phone so I don’t get the blue light. Then, over my evening cigarette, I reflect on the cortisol coursing through my body and I wonder how many things can be undone.

*

I have an urge to make this piece longer, flesh it out, look at the themes. Find a nice button to end it on, maybe add in a bit more about my lengthy recovery from a disorder that no longer holds the scythe to the edge of my life. But here’s the thing: I don’t know where to end because I don’t know where to start. I know the historical answer — the desirability politics, the racist, classist roots of the ideals. I know the big money behind marketed desire, the way needs are created and sold and metabolized and reformulated and sold again. I read a lot about Catholic anorexia.

But the promise of thinness exists to me as a perpetual taunt, an enemy and a friend all at once, the carrot at the end of the stick and then the stick that turns to beat me over the head. I won’t put a bow on this now, because it’s not over. I’ll come back to this idea, because I have to, and maybe one day I’ll be able to talk about it more extensively. After all, it’s never over.

*

Can I go back to Jeff Buckley?

Yes, I feel too young to hold on /
And much too old to break free and run