Chapter Text
She craves delicacy like some people crave fullness. She waits and wills for that careful emptiness to overtake her. There is something so captivating in that painstaking area between fading and lovely, in the bird-thin presence of barely-there models on magazines. It feels like the world doesn’t want her to be vibrant. She’s adamantine where she should be soft and giving, all endless tenderness where she should be sharp edges. Her bones start poking out of her skin. She likes it.
When she was a child there were endless trees outside her window. Branches breaking down into frail twigs. She knows she bruises easily, from playground spats to unkind hands to endless falls from evergreens. She thinks that she’d like it. She’d like it if her outside reflected her insides: brittle boned, fragile, barbed. Meticulous hands pleat her hair into delicate braids; she thinks of the space that she steals. Her mother is shrinking, electrifying laughter fading to grey and endless silence. She looks at diaphanous women on the television and thinks I want to be like you someday.
For a moment, as she grows into herself, she rebels. There was an adolescent with flame-bright hair and effervescent energy and extravagant, vibrant love for life. She finds that she’s bad at being vivid. She slips back into her world of pastels and greyscale, and no one even notices she’s gone.
She thinks that one day she’ll fade so much, shrink so much, she’ll disappear. She thinks that one day someone will look up and realize she’s not there. She thinks that one day the foggy distance of the world will fully blanket her in the comfort of security, away from the precarious and complicated life she once led, and she’ll sigh, and she’ll sob, but part of her will be relieved. And she’ll walk through the world a shade of herself, finally released from the turbulent bonds of living. Sometimes it feels like she’s got one less layer of skin, like everything hurts her just a bit more. She thinks of bird-thin women with dull eyes and wonders if they’re the lucky ones. She thinks of the stinging and violent world she lives in and says yes. She thinks of her brilliant puerile self and says no.
The honest truth of the matter is that she’s built to be sturdy. That her mother was built the same. All broad shoulders and thick wrists, ankles connected to wide feet, and chests connected to strong necks. Even as her mother shrinks. She doesn’t fill her frame anymore; she leaves it half vacant. Even as her bones poke from her skin and eyes sink deeper, she never becomes delicate; she never becomes frail. Her mouth stretches with silent pleas, why won’t you let me be breakable? Why won’t you let me just shatter? Why draw it out? But no one answers. She shrinks into herself, diminishing, and contemplates how hollow-bonded and brittle she can become.