Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

And please know that there is no such thing as a bad body. Truly. Take up space, it is your birthright.

I don’t respond, seething. Instead I check Tinder. I swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe. It’s dazzling how disposable we all are.

Youngest kids have iron constitutions. Hardy hides from lifetimes of rejection. A hundred million entreaties for their older siblings to hang out answered by shoves, eye rolls, slammed doors, and stone-cold ditches with peals of laughter.

She’s so girlish, so delicate and quintessentially lovely that biological truths on her are blushingly seductive. Titillating and carnal. It’s a subversion that requires nothing from you. Arousal that makes you feel like a feminist. Sometimes the female gaze is just as systemically toxic the way it postures as provocation.

It’s why randomness is unacceptable. Why organized religion is a salve. It’s far more palatable to think of a divine order. Why conspiracies are easier to stomach over psychopaths making a rash decision that alters the course of history.

With us, there was a smart one and a pretty one. Except then I got ugly. Or “healthy,” according to Mom’s church group, who’d gamely pat my love handles and pinch my cheeks. “It’s not the meals she eats at home that are the problem,” Mom would say in a stage whisper. “Texas sized means Texas thighs.”

oh this breaks my heart

shake my head. Hopefully he’ll see my refusal as I intend it. That I don’t take up too much space. That I’m agreeable, low-maintenance, chill. I decide not to leave anything on his nightstand. It wouldn’t work on a Patrick.

I follow her small shoulders and perm back into the kitchen, wondering how it would feel to be touched by my mother without bracing for criticism.

search around the sink, greeted by the row of inside-out Ziploc freezer bags, handwashed and tented. Their logos have been rubbed off from reuse.

That it was an unspoken pact between me and my new friends. Toward the end of freshman year, one of us had gotten thinthinthin. Only I knew her secret. How she ate everything and then un-ate it. Hit reset. We’d never talked about it, but I heard her. And I know she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t.

She pulled out a chair and served me generously. Not the half servings I’d been getting from her and from all the church ladies who had been forbidden to overfeed me. My weight was a joint concern.

Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about.

I remember how it felt, pushing the surface of the digital scale with my toe, stepping on with my eyes closed, praying for a miracle.

Mom turns around and loops my hair around my ear. I wait for the barb. How the pants are a little tight across my thighs or that I need to brush my hair, but it doesn’t come. Instead she smiles and squeezes my arm affectionately. I pocket this moment for myself. This memory alone makes the trip just about worth it.

June kills the engine. “Every time someone hurts you, you find a way to hurt yourself ten times worse.” It doesn’t sound untrue even if it feels wounding coming from my sister.

Manufactured urgency is their absolute favorite emotion. I get it. Control feels good no matter how small the triumph.

Hours of YouTube makeup tutorials prepared me for the rest of my life. I learned exactly how to appear indestructible. Impenetrable. Paint as armor.

But once we arrive and the faraway is known and becomes familiar, then what? You’ve got all that energy and longing and possibility that no longer has anywhere to go. It’s got nowhere to be invested, nowhere to live. Have you ever considered that it isn’t a place that will improve your life? That there is no such thing as a geographic cure?”

There’s such powerful recognition in the diagnosis. Everybody respects cancer. Being sick with cancer would explain my sadness, my sickness, my anxiety, and the horrible suspicion that everyone in the world was born with a user’s manual or a guide to personal happiness but me.

The cheese balls are a mistake. They dissolve too quickly, so they don’t provide that choking feeling as they’re going down. But they taste great after vanilla glaze. The whole ritual feels as though I’m being run over by the slowest-moving train. I can’t get off. I vaguely want to, but it’s overruled. Because truly this is the only thing I can count on. This has never left me no matter where I am.

I retch into my hand, another kind of sacrament. I do this so the telltale splash doesn’t give me away. Even when I’m alone. I’ve always been a little proud of this. How quietly I can hit reset. I keep going, putting my mouth where people shit and abasing myself the way I always do, trying to exorcise the hate and anger and never managing to get it all out.

this is so damaged that it breaks my heart

Absurdly it’s just 8:30 in the evening, of a day that seems to have so many days nested into it.

My sister grips my arm. “Jayne,” she says. “It’s your hands. You can’t stop smelling them. That’s your tell. That’s how I know when you do it. We can get whatever help you need. We’ll get you the best. You just have to get better.”

😭

I’ve been stunned and injured when I’ve lost the weight and not been given the respect or recognition I knew I deserved. I’ve starved myself skinny and been absolutely fucking miserable.