Empty

by Susan Burton

The years when I knew her body in the way only a young child does, standing next to her in the master bedroom’s avocado-green tiled shower, watching her from a bench in a changing room at the club. I knew even her insides; that small stomach gurgled. I’d lain my head there at night while she read. Hers was the female body I learned first, and in a million complex ways, it will be forever connected to mine.

MY MOTHER SAID THAT when you moved to a new place, it took a year to get used to it and another year to feel like you’d always been there.

I’d think all day about what I would eat, and then I would sit down to food and think about what I wouldn’t eat of it.

But if you wait until you understand everything, you never say anything at all.