So Far
Cameron Steele It still shocks me when I open Facebook and see girls dying over having a body. It sounds wrong and I shouldn’t admit it, but at first, in the moments before the guilt rushes in, my own stomach flipping in its acid, I judge them. Why’d they take it that far? Why didn’t they stop before it got that bad. I click on their profile pictures and seek out evidence of difference: This one had a feeding tube for a whole year, this one started starving herself when her mother died as a girl, this one loves a boyfriend who abused her just like her father did. But this last one was in rehab at the same time as me, cried over the size of her cheeks with me, rolled her eyes at the infantilism of group therapy and adult coloring books alongside me, quietly laughing when I began to snap the colored pencils in half and hide them beneath the couches. We didn’t get through the whole box, but almost. It’s not the same. My thing is not the same. I scroll through digital photo albums that show her cheeks turning bone, eyes turning ghost, eyeliner becoming great gashes of black against see-through skin. God, all of this shit always sounds so cliché. I think of a professor last year, on my grad school essay about women writing the body, underlining the word “body image” and suggesting a more academic term. See? Cliché: I catch myself rolling my eyes, popping a mint into my mouth, crunching it, and another, and another in quick succession between my teeth. Lunch. For today. I’ll eat a big dinner to compensate. I’ll get the calories in by the time I swallow melatonin to help sleep tonight, track it all in my Notes app next to the ideas for poems, half-started grocery lists, links to stuff I want to read next month when my cookies repopulate my browser’s free allotment of articles. When you start to desire the world more than the bingeing and purging, a shrink told me, you’ll know you’re on the right track. I am on the right track: I crave cookies and art, a newly tiled bathroom, a doctorate degree, my marriage to survive me. I was never as sick as she was. I am not dead or near dying. Actually, I am pregnant. Heading into the seventh week, a mistake we plan to keep, though I spent the entire car ride from my parents’ house on Christmas frantically Googling how to keep off face fat during the third trimester. No matter, I tell my husband. I will do what I have to do, filter out the rest. I will glow and post bump selfies and sweetly sardonic Instagram captions that will muse curiously at my new motherhood and, sure, my bulimia, too, that old girl. My old body, driven and riven as it was by cramming full and wringing out, when I mention it online, will be cast as what I have overcome, what I have journeyed through. A dead skin I have sloughed off (and perhaps sometimes miss, perhaps sometimes pull like snakeskin from a cherished case, gently working its textures between newly swollen fingers, wondering at the little that is left of what I have cast aside). It is a kind of death, it is for the best, and sometimes now I feel so goddamn far from dead I am heady with the distance of it. Facebook tells me this girl died 14 hours ago. Is anyone looking to get rid of a hot glue gun? She asked in her last post. Treatment is nothing if not hours of gentle crafting, women flopped around tables full of construction paper and glitter and brightly colored things like caricatures of children. The glue guns, though, were fun. The burning, the stickiness, the satisfaction of peeling what had dried off of yourself, starting anew. My phone rings. What do you want for dinner, baby? My husband asks me. A girl I knew from rehab died, I say. I’m sorry, he says. I’m sorry. You’ve come so far. |
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About the Author:
Cameron Steele is a writer in her third year of the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her essays and poems have appeared in Entropy, American Poets, The Fix, Bluestem Magazine, Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, Wherewithal, Ivy Hall Review, and elsewhere. Her poems won first place in the Gaffney Award for the Academy of American Poets in 2019.
Cameron Steele is a writer in her third year of the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her essays and poems have appeared in Entropy, American Poets, The Fix, Bluestem Magazine, Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, Wherewithal, Ivy Hall Review, and elsewhere. Her poems won first place in the Gaffney Award for the Academy of American Poets in 2019.