It’s the taste of your diet bars, chocolate but also rebellion, that she sneaks by twos and threes from the kitchen cabinet, unwrapping and swallowing them, unchewed; it’s the comment after a big meal about how you’re “never going to eat again”; it’s your worry that her two-year-old is too fat and suggesting that she maybe take her to the doctor to have her checked out; it’s the way that you say, about other women: “she’s so tall,” “she’s so striking,” “she’s so slender”; it’s the way you talk about yourself and your “too wide” hips; it’s the way you never want to give her “a complex” but the whole out-loud worry itself gives has the same effect of giving her “a complex”; it’s you noting that her friend is “so tall, thin, and beautiful’ that “maybe you shouldn’t go out with her when trying to meet men”; it’s the way you respond―or don’t respond―when a male relative says she “used to be so cute and then she…” and then he mimes a body blowing up like a balloon to indicate that she got bigger; it’s the way she is not supposed to get bigger.

It’s the way that a boy in her 3rd-grade class mouths “You should lose…” and then holds up the words “10 lbs,” cut from a magazine cover; it’s the way that a boy in her 8th-grade class writes in her yearbook: “Fatness is a pig; a pig is fatness, but you’re just a cool duder;” it’s the way you circle the areas of her body that are the most problematic, with a black sharpie in front of the mirror; it’s the taste of peanut butter and butter sandwiches, the slickness of the fat on her tongue, the feeling of partially-masticated bread, so soft against the roof of her mouth, like a cloud, like cotton candy, like cotton balls, like a comforter, like comfort; it’s her friends wondering aloud why they crave such soft things when they are binge-ing―bread, cupcakes, twinkies, Hostess pies―not celery, not carrots; it’s the taste of chocolate covered raisins from the Costco-sized container that her college roommate’s parents send, how she can’t eat just a handful, but instead handful after guilty handful, and still she never feels like it’s enough; there’s never a moment where she says to herself I’ve had enough; it’s the way she thinks that if her body looks a certain way, then she’ll be happy; if she fits into a certain size, then she’ll be happy; if she look in the mirror and likes what she sees, she’ll be happy; it’s the way she never sees you look in the mirror and like what you see; it’s the way that you are never happy.

It’s the way she sculpts her life’s goal from the silence of those smoked-filled car rides during family trips, oh please please make me only smart enough to be happy; it’s the way you wonder how she could still be a child in her mid-20s, like she was supposed to just grow up on her own without any sunlight, any effort like she’s a weed; it’s the way she doesn’t even need much, could have lived on little; it’s the way there is no abuse, not even neglect in the traditional sense, just no care for her emotions, since how could you have cared about her emotions if you never cared about your own?; It’s the way she snuffs them out with cereal, with peanut butter sandwiches, with diet bar after diet bar; it’s the way she wants to be good, be erased so she will not feel so much, be so much; it’s the way she takes her revenge or protects herself, like in the fantasy she has where everyone’s hands all over her; it’s the way she understands, how can she possibly miss it, that her body isn’t hers, it is a public service announcement that―like advertisements showing women in parts, an arm, a leg, a belly button, an exposed neck, a collection of parts, lying supine―communicates that the best possible thing she can be is dead.

Friedman

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s most recent work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Autofocus Lit, Pithead Chapel, Memoir Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times. Her creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego and attended the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023. You can find her on Twitter @loriyeg