Trimming the Fat

I don’t remember the first time I felt the urge to carve away my excess. Maybe it was when I was around 6, and one of my friends harmlessly pointed out that of all the little girls sitting on the bench, my thighs spread out the most when we sat in our shorts. Maybe that was the first time my hand itched for a butcher knife. Or perhaps later, a different group of friends this time, 6^th graders drunk on Bonnie Bell and JTT, trading size 2 jeans and tank tops. Me off to the side, nearly convincing even myself that the accessories were the only things that interested me anyway. I’m sure by that time the lure of the blade had entered my mind. It was a common fantasy by high school, when my mom told me I looked like a prostitute for showing too much cleavage, and I had already learned to dread visits to my grandma for I knew they would come with lectures on the ties of size and beauty and success and happiness. The family camping trip, when everyone got milkshakes but my dad still asked “if I really needed to eat that,” surely brought on a sullen gaze, perceived as insolence, but merely a cover for the scene playing out in my head. One where I could stand naked in front of the mirror, knife in hand, and start painfully, but at last, shrinking. I would stand in my bathroom staring, mentally drawing the lines as a plastic surgeon marks corrections in the way an English professor might mark an unworthy essay; “extraneous, cut this down,” “more definition here.” How fucked up that as a child in the single digits, I would plan how many ACE bandages I would need to wrap my middle tightly, hopefully quelling the bleeding of my mutilated flesh after I had finally achieved a better form.

The older I’ve gotten the less I’ve ached to be “skinny,” yet my curves aren’t in all the right places, and it is a rare week that the thought “If only I could just cut this off” doesn’t flit through my heat at least once or twice. Plus size is all the rage right now, but only if you still have a flat stomach and taut, smooth skin. Maybe, I fantasize momentarily, if I lop off my stomach, the scar tissue that takes its place will at least be firm…

Sometimes I want to weep for my 8 year old self.  A little girl so hyper aware of being too big, ironically always found lacking for the sin of being too plentiful.

Sometimes I want to weep for my 29 year old self.