In media, girlhood is beautiful.
In media, we are aglow in the lamplight, and there is no place to look beside the wet dew of our lashes. In media we are gorgeous and long-limbed and we make hourglasses in the skyline when the sun hits our back just so. We dance, and our hair swoops in impressionistic waves down our backs where our ribs protrude like the filaments of some leftover fish, painter’s tape on the ridges of our cheekbones, and we count our calories in the place of stars. You won’t see us close our eyes. When we fall asleep, we will dream of folding ourselves into fourths; small, smaller until we unfoldable and barely breathing.
*
In media, girlhood is a lie I cannot swallow. A myth I cannot see myself in.
But who am I to tell you what girlhood is, besides what I know of it?
*
This is one thing I know:
That sometimes, when I tug at the gather of my stomach, hard enough to leave pink ribbons on the flesh, I wish that I could tuck my appetite into the container of a still-small, still-skinny body; I wish I was ten again.
Ten is marked by nights sitting alone at the dinner table. Ten is dinner-times traversing broccoli forests and raging carrot bonfires, bell-pepper smoke curling through the air and me, eroding slowly into the yellow smudge of oil-blotted light. Gut churning, I force down each revolting spoonful of food, filed away in a skinny body still three sizes too big for my shrunken appetite. My mother says it is because I was born with acid reflux, and now I feel the ghostly trace of sour regurgitate every time I eat, and that the acid took up half the space of my stomach. She points to my skin, dressed around wire armature like a paper doll, a leotard stretched around skeleton and sighs. See. This is the result, her voice thick with frustration and concern. You’re too skinny.
Later, she will take me to the hospital so that the doctor can tell me the same thing. Everything is cold and white and sterile, like a glove in which I am the space of a fingernail, a molecule of sweat. Mother at my side, I am shuffled from room to room, weighed on the scale at 62 pounds, dumped into an examination chair, legs crinkling paper in the white-washed silence. I still remember this day as if it were etched into the fabric of my being, a tattoo for bone–the doctor smiles but his eyes are cold cesspools of pity. He wraps my body, shivering and hospital-gown clad, into a statistic of a blue dot swimming below the curve of healthy BMI, gesturing towards his computer spilled like a light, and I understand two things. I am this dot, and the other: that I am drowning. A boat, capsized, spilling its guts to the gaping black maw of the ocean; lungs filling with water; choking on empty calories. A small fear is a potent catalyst, and I begin to heal.
But I am sixteen now, and somewhere between the years running sticky like molasses I have lost the soft touch of innocence, the bandages I wrapped for myself when I was ten. Now I am a colosseum in the closed container of a shower curtain, unmaking memories and shedding the only way I can; under water. When I am done, I wipe away the fog in the bathroom mirror so I can stare at the unshapely swells of my body, pinching the skin I want to cut away–thinking, how I want to be ten again. How much I want to drown. Holding these wishes like syrup candy, souring cheek. If only I hated food, if only I had a small appetite, if only I were still a picky eater, if only, if only. The shower is still running and I let it, curling my mouth around the steam crinkled like eyelashes, rolling this joint between my lips as if I could get drunk on desire.
*
This is another thing I know:
That I have created measuring systems for the bloating of my body.
Stand here, in the corner of your bedroom, next to bed and the yoga mat you bought to start pilates, that day you failed, the same day you dug hunger into your bones and cried in the darkness of the mall’s fitting room; a wounded fixture of want. Space your legs roughly one book apart, something thick and digging into bare flesh–old copies of exercise pamphlets, diet culture diagrams. Square your shoulders, look down. Take note. Watch.
I am planted in this corner, montaged clips motion-captured to a body lapsing like moon phases, my feet rooted into wood as I stare at the hill of my stomach, counting the swirls in the floorboard’s grain. Measuring, this line which means failure, this line that tells me tomorrow I must starve–to obtain, to maintain. Today, I am between “skinny” and “slightly bloated”, a wood pattern that resembles an eye peeking from crude, coiled bark, unfurling within varnish. Today I haven’t eaten since breakfast, a handful of pecans and a bottle of water; today I relished the ache of my stomach as I biked to school, and today I submerged my face under the wailing of the bathroom sink to keep from falling asleep in class. As the water held her fingers close to my skin, covered my mouth and closed my eyelids, I smiled and let it run over my teeth too–because isn’t this drowning? The waistband of my pants serves as another ruler for beauty, and I cinch the band; thumb, forefinger, middle, adding folds like cake batter pleating into pan, counting one, two, three. Yes, I am drowning, I decide. Yesterday I only managed two folds on the same pair of pants. And now the floor tells me the same.
I don’t remember exactly when I began measuring myself this way, in the markings on wood panels and anything else that would stay the same while I waned like gibbous moon. Perhaps I stepped out of the shower one day and realized that when I looked down, beyond the mass of my own self, I could no longer see the wood pattern of an eye that I saw the day before, standing in the same spot. But what I do know is that I am desperate on the days that I fail and empty on the days that I succeed. A pitted peel, a rind of gorged flesh, hungry, aching, drowning, hurting–but then I look in the mirror, at the flat expanse of skin confirmed by the slats of my wooden cage, and I feel nothing at all.
*
A third thing I know:
That self-confidence is as fragile as the pink half-circle of a lung; that lungs are soft and crocheted from an architecture of holes.
I am sick in bed for two weeks because of pneumonia. There is nothing to do except sleep and eat, wake up groggy and stuffy, cocooned in the darkness, eat more soup and sleep again. My lungs rattle, two beans in a tin can, a skeleton of aluminum and buttoned tissue. I learn to taste colors in the time it takes to recover; pink Benadryl, gray bed sheets, white thermometer pressed to bruised, burning skin, yellow chicken broth. Darkness, black as gasping petroleum. Silver, a scale that says I have gained four pounds.
My friends want to go shopping, excited to try on homecoming dresses that we won’t buy and splurge on overpriced boba and I don’t say no although I am tasting the color of self-confidence grinded to fairy dust. I am a butterfly afraid to leave the warmth of a swaddle, draped in baggy sweatshirts to hide the disgusting four pounds I have engulfed beneath skin. We march through stores, my friends bubbling with laughter and loading my arms with sparkling dresses that have ruching down the sides, even though they accentuate my thick arms and now-thick legs; I hold them to my chest in front of the mirror and taste embarrassment like sawdust. When they are not looking, I put each dress back on the shelves. Wondering, as I puddle into shadow, into self-loathing, if the wetness of my wings is of my own fault. If butterflies want to return to their cocoons too, where survival is the only issue, where the fatter the healthier, the plumper the closer to beauty.
I learn, later, that I have not recovered; in fact, I am sick again. This time I am a lesson in atrophy, in withering away. In starvation, and battling the body into a mold of an hourglass, pouring hips into the curve of falling sand. Cursing sickness with pointed teeth, hating a broken skeleton for surviving in the only way it could. Crying in the middle of Forever 21, burying face in yellow shopping bag, fluorescent light blooming on the shadow between hip dips and food babies, the hollow of a bowl, a dress with ruching. Undoing, like the unbuttoning of corduroy. Shaping, shaping, shaping. Knowing, a butterfly with no wings is not pretty at all.
*
Do you see now?
This is girlhood: spread open before you like an empty palm.
And I, a girl, know that somewhere in the world there will be another girl who measures her body in the markings on a floor, the waistband of a pant; who will wish that being skinny was as easy as hating food; who will hold her confidence in the flashing light of falling numbers on a silver scale, counting each shivering pound under bated breath. Perhaps, like me, she will compare herself to the girls in the media, the girls who laugh through wet dew, porcelain-skinned, origami bent into rectangles that can no longer fold–and search for the parts of them that look like her. Maybe, I want to tell her to stop tugging at her skin and hating her stretch marks, wrinkles, folds of pleated satin, so that I can tell myself the same thing. And tonight, as I write this, I am reminding myself to heal. Watch me close my eyes. Watch me look at the stars and count them, watch my body undulate like the night sky, watch me learn to accept all the creases and crevices. Watch me remember, that this too, is girlhood. Loving myself with all the fibers of my being.
About the Author:
Claire Guo is a passionate young writer born and raised in San Jose, CA. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, the Bluefire Journal, and on the Bow Seat, Cupertino Rotary, and Scott. G. Fitzgerald website. She has obtained multiple gold and silver keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Award and currently serves as her school newspaper’s Features Section Editor. She dreams of writing and publishing a novella.
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