Invisible Fat

My cold, emaciated body lay on the kitchen floor, the fragile bones extraordinarily visible underneath the snow white skin that seems stretched out over them. I look down at my body in slight disgust, seeing my veins so clearly and still some fat. I thought I had gotten rid of all the fat in my body, but I still see some. No one found my malnourished shell until hours later. The police said that I committed suicide by starving myself for a few days. That is not how it went, I had anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder. My environment was poisonous to my body image, and I had strived to get the perfect body until I passed out, never to wake up again.

Yes, I was messed up in the head. While everyone else was seeing nothing but a walking skeleton, I still saw fat on me. Even now, looking down at my body I still see invisible fat underneath the pink ribbon scars on my hips, stomach, and thighs. Thankfully when in ballet attire they were hidden underneath the pale pink tights. My ballet teacher always had me in the star role of everything possible. She was always telling me that I had to be no bigger than a size three. The smaller the waist, the better was her motto. None of the parents thought anything of it either. Neither my teacher nor any of the parents realized that most of us ballerinas were taking in a lot less calories than we danced off. Most of them were like me, anorexic. Our teacher once flipped out on me when I said I was now wearing a size three, even though I had assured her it was barely fitting me. That day, I vowed I would eat less just to go down to size zero.

I did get to size zero, but not as fast as I would have liked. My having a mother who is a binge eater made avoiding food almost impossible. I still managed it about ninety-nine percent of the time, but sometimes she just forced me to eat the same amount as she did. That was absolutely disgusting; I always exercised twice as much when she did that to me. My mother is in fact one of the reasons for my anorexia. She is just so fat and grotesque that I hated her. She was happy when she could fit into her size twenty-six elastic waistband pants. Size twenty-six is way too big. The Glob-my nickname for my mother-still would eat pounds of food everyday even after having a heart attack. She cannot walk down our thirty foot hallway without getting out breath. It is pathetic. I refused to ever look like her at all.

Thank the gods for my apparently beanpole of a father. I never met him, so I have no clue what he looks like other than the fact that I look like the female version of him. If it were not for his also having anorexia nervosa and already good skinny genes, I would be just as morbidly obese as my mother. I never knew my father because the poor guy starved himself to death, just like I did. As they always say: like father, like daughter. I must admit that I do kind of hate him for having this dreadful, yet so sweet disorder. If it were not for him having it, and the Glob having her binge eating disorder, maybe I would have turned out perfectly normal, and naturally tiny.

There is another thing; my dad's side of the family never paid attention to me, because they saw too much of him in me. I guess they really will see him in my bony, anorexic body now. My mother's family was a whole different story unfortunately. When I was younger, about five or six and pre-anorexia, I would eat a lot of food, as in I was eating more calories than my body would burn off in three days. Not matter what, even in sickness, I would eat that much. Thankfully, genetics had yet to catch up to me and make me chubby. Glob's family is the main reason I started eating less and less every week when I turned about nine years old. At every family get-together, they would look at my plate and laugh. Every single one of them, about twenty of them came to each get-together, would tell me that the amount I eat will eventually catch up to me. They said I would become a porker, or fat, just like my mother. Most of my cousins refused to ever talk to me other than to taunt me, calling me Porkie or Chub-Chub. With every bite I stuffed into my mouth, they would oink or moo. This unfortunately continued into my anorexia years. No one, other than my mom, seemed to notice that I was eating less. Granted, my mother hardly noticed, she was too busy eating to notice my siblings and me, let alone what we ate.

I must admit in the last two months of my life, people were starting to take a bit of notice to how thin I was. My ballet teacher was not really worried about my weight, but my fragility and having the energy to perform. It was to the point that I could hardly do a leap without hurting myself in the slightest bit. One simple chasse across the room exercise would wind me. As a result of that, she took me out of my lead role in the Swan Lake. That was the one ballet that I had always wanted to star in. That role was taken from me and given to, not my understudy, but some new girl who just joined our class. I would not have been so mad had she given the role to my understudy, but this girl was so conceited, and it made her think she was better than me. No one in that class was better than me, except for the teacher. After the play started and I could not even do a simple role, she kicked me out. I was out of my favorite thing about life. In my eyes, I was not skinny enough to stay in ballet so I continued to starve myself even more.

My friends began to notice as well and asked me what was going on. Of course I just told them that I was suffering from the stomach flu and had not been able to eat in a few days. They fortunately believed me. All of them threatened to go to the counselor about it if I was lying, and I knew the counselor would make me gain weight. That was something I most certainly did not want that.

Clearly, my friends never got the chance to do anything about it. I was in the kitchen looking for celery, just so I could say that I ate something, and had begun to feel rather light-headed. Stars danced before my eyes as I felt my knees give out on me. My world turned black and I felt nothing, saw nothing. At least I did not see anything until I found myself looking down at my tiny lifeless body lying on the tile floor of the kitchen. My anorexia had run its course and taken my life from me.