My Secret Family

Art Class

Mia

56 kg and falling

When I lie on my bed and look at the ceiling l imagine I am falling down through cotton candy clouds to the pristine world below. As I fall through the clouds I become so light that I don't fall any more, the breeze catches me and held aloft I play in the clouds and fly above vast mountains and through grand canyons. I am light as a feather, stiff as a board.

I haven't eaten real food in two days and I feel like I am always on the verge of dizziness, flipping between being light-headed and totally lucid. I want to fade away, to become a bird, float above the world, just pissing down on all the stupid people who spend their lives making my life miserable.

Every evening at 6:30pm my dad forced us to sit around the heavy wooden table he made in an adult shop class he was taking. We had to hold hands and pray like little kids before every meal. Today he was saying thanks for all the love he received every day from his family, even though we hated each other. I couldn't wait to finish studying just so I could move away and never speak to them again, never be forced to sit around a table in silence while they argued.

I liked to close my eyes and take deep breaths of my food instead of eating it, to pretend I was chewing. I swear I could feel each piece go down my throat and make my stomach heavier. My mom was a pretty good cook but only with baking, not with regular food. I was practically 50 percent pastry. Was.

My culinary meditation annoyed my dad, but my mom just smiled and talked about a new size zero dress she saw.

I suppose you want to hear that my childhood sucked, or that there was some Freudian motivational factor that made me who I am. You want to hear that I was driven to desperate measures or that my mother abused me psychologically or my father sexually, but you will be disappointed. My mother was awesome.

She was the one who taught me to cut my food into smaller pieces and drink water in between each bite so that I would feel full. She knew what she was doing, how to keep her size zero figure. She was my hero, my inspiration. My thinspiration.

It was my dad who was the problem in our little family unit, a health freak who demanded each of us eat exactly the right number of calories every day, regardless of how horrible the meal was, or how full we were, or what we were feeling. Who could live like that and not become a raging psycho?

I didn't have a problem. The truth is, I simply liked to experience the world, the taste of it, the smell of it. I drank in every cloud on the horizon and tasted every transient moment, food being just another life experience I wanted to savor in fine hallucinatory detail.

The first time I met Sophie, I admit, I didn't like her, especially her too-full-of-make-up pixie face, but she grew on me pretty fast. Even though she stole my best friend I didn't actually mind. Sophie and Ana were made to be friends, they liked to tease each other, they had the same type of self-control, the same sense of style, they could go days without eating if they wanted.

I loved to eat, no wait, oh my god, I lived to eat. Food was amazing. I loved the way pizza squelched in my mouth, crunched up against my tongue in sweet and salty bliss, the way chocolate ice cream changed flavor as it melted, how, when I closed my eyes, the dark creaminess enveloped my tongue and my whole being faded away into a solitary nothingness as it embraced that divine flavor, made immaculately by the gods Ben and Jerry.

Before I met Ana I was a chubby nobody, ostracized by most of the school, shunned by even the weird kids except for the nerds who clung to anyone different like a flock of frightened sheep. But who wanted to hang around with nerds? Ana showed me the way, and now I was dating guys I had only dreamed of. Men, real men. I finally felt worthy, the person I was supposed to be.