Dietland

by Sarai Walker

The medication took away my sadness and replaced it with something else—not happiness, but more like a low dull hum, a weak radio frequency of feeling that couldn’t be turned up or down.

In my real life I would have more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life wasn’t real yet.

When I was around women who had grown-up lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time, like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

hear that you’re smart, but I don’t mind that.

I hated it when others alluded to my size, despite the obviousness of it. It was as if they were confirming that there was something wrong with me when I’d hoped they hadn’t noticed it.

“The weight-loss industry is the most profitable failed industry in history,

Once I had a taste of real food, I always wanted more. I spent my days tiptoeing around food, the way one might tiptoe into a baby’s room while it’s sleeping. One wrong move and the baby wakes up and screams. That’s how it was with hunger, too. Once it awakes, it screams and screams and there’s only one way to quiet it.

I wanted his want.

“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”

“You can’t let go of pain. It’s not a balloon that can float into the sky.”

“You’ve always been angry, Plum. I just want you to direct that anger where it belongs, not at yourself.”

I was tired of being obedient.

“In the face of possible death by explosion, you put on a bra?” Rubí said. “That’s not proper bomb threat etiquette,” Verena said.

People had always insulted me by calling me fat, but they couldn’t hurt me that way, not anymore. I was fat, and if I no longer saw it as a bad thing, then the weapon they had used against me lost its power.

“I think it’s a response to terrorism. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all. We’re told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”

was burned at thirteen, around the time that puberty set in,” Sana said. “I had always been a tomboy—is that what you call it? My friends and I were starting our periods and growing breasts—you know the awkwardness of that age—and here this horrible thing happened to me at the same time. I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”