To Let Go

Twenty Three

Ten Years Earlier
After Emma's admission for Cardiac Arrests

Fat.

I feel fat. All I am made of is fat. I hate myself. I hate my body. And all of my fat. Now I'm back at the hospital where I'll get more fat. With the NG tube and the high caloric meals and no exercise. Just sitting in a bed all day getting fat.

I think there's a certain point where everything makes you fat. It's not just food now. Water is full of this fat. Even the air has more than trillion calories. Clothes have cholesterol. The objects we fiddle with daily have grams of sugar. The feeding tube pumps these calories into my clumsy obese body.

How many days have I drunken anything? How many weeks have I not eaten for? How many months have I exercised for? How many years have I cried over my figure? All was done in the pursuit of perfection. I do not care what others think. I don't see why everyone wants me to be fat. Aren't I already fat enough?

The nurse finishes taking my vitals, and enters the data into the computer. I can just feel the fat piling up. I look out my door to see people go by on wheelchairs, on crutches. They wheel IVs around and l I do see Dr. McAndrew and a few other surgeons wheel a small child on a gurney down the hall.

The hospital feels so hallow. So empty. Yet so full. Like there's nothing all around yet you're suffocating. I guess if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones. Because most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs. Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong.

Speak of the devil.

"Emma," he rushes in upon seeing me. Go away Leo. "Emma, what happened??!"

"I had a cardiac arrest. And they brought me here." Which technically isn't a lie. But I didn't tell him everything either. How can I?

"Why?" Here's the million dollar question.

"I was on a run. And then I collapsed because it has too bad on my heart. It has to be my heart can't handle me being overweight."

"What?" He snorts. "Is that a joke?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're not, by any figment of the mind, overweight. You're severely underweight."

"Oh? Then what do you call 80 pounds? It's taken me forever to get to 77, now I gained three of them back!" I say angrily.

"80 pounds?!" His eyes bug out. "What are you trying to be!? 60 something?"

"That would be nice." I sigh dreamily. Honestly, I'd love to see my entire skeleton.

"You do realize you're killing yourself, right?"

"I don't care if I die," I whisper, tears forming. "I need to be perfect. It's either live life horridly fat, or die perfect."

"But don't you want to live?" He asks, tears coming to his own.

I shake my head side to side.

"No."

His face becomes a twisted mass of horror and grief.