In her skin

TW: eating disorders, self harm



The bag was packed. Neatly, meticulously, as if in folding my clothes I could manifest a tidier mind. A novel rested on top–unread, but worn from the times I’d picked it up and pretended I would. 

I sat by the edge of the bed, back straight, hands resting on my knees. The air was always the same here–lingering with antiseptic and something else I couldn’t name. A medical, cool smell. The nurse had said someone would come for me soon. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. I didn’t check the clock. Instead, I stared at the white door, rehearsing how I’d smile when it opened. I’d say “thank you,” like I meant it, and walk out into a world that might finally make sense to me. I’d be like everyone else who knew how to exist naturally, no longer a creature hesitating somewhere between child and woman, grasping for the frays of who I thought I wanted to be and who I was.

My name was Logan Blackfield. I didn’t think much about it, but I knew it had never felt like mine. My body and name seemed to me more of a placeholder of how other people saw me. I questioned how I might look if my outside reflected who I felt like internally. I liked reading, though I didn’t do it much anymore, and writing; I liked flowers, especially tulips and snapdragons, animals, the smell of burning candles, organising, showers, nighttime in my room, and anything of beauty. I disliked the feeling of long nails, dirty hair, glasses on my face, people who folded books, warm weather, large crowds, the colour orange, bright or flashing lights, feeling my clothes on my body, people that complained when it rained, floral patterned clothing, questions with obvious answers, and hoarders. 

What do you want out of this? she had asked on the first day. It made therapy sound like a transaction, like I should know why I did to myself what I had. What did I want? A different body, a different mind? Somebody else’s life? I couldn’t say those things aloud so I melted into the silence and allowed the tightness behind my ribs to deepen.

Kelly Nelson had seated herself in front of me on a grey couch. She’d always be with her notebook, and often I wondered what it was she was saying about me in there.

I don’t know. 

My voice came out distantly, like hearing oneself speak in a video for the first time and being mortified by the knowledge that this was what others heard everyday.

This place wasn’t what the movies said it would be, and I wasn’t what the television depicted. You had to be crazy to end up in a place like this, screaming and barefoot and close to killing yourself. I looked at the other patients then glanced at my reflection in the window, the white lights bleaching my skin into something waxy and distant; a child’s reverie. I wasn’t underweight or sticking my fingers down my throat ten times a day. I didn’t go days without eating or consume excessive amounts at a time. It didn’t feel like I was killing myself, and if it was truly that bad, wouldn’t somebody have noticed something sooner?

I used my time in the ward solving jigsaw puzzles I didn’t care for, playing card games I’d forget the moment I was out; I’d try sitting myself down and reading like I used to, or writing stories in my notebook that had once come so easily to me. Mostly, I’d play music in my ears and try not to draw attention to myself in group therapy. They’d always call on me regardless of my attempt at disinterest. 

I glanced at the clock as it ticked on slowly above the desk, undisturbed. 09:18 AM. How long had I been waiting, minutes or days? The bag was still there, untouched and neater than I’d normally pack it, as though I had done it before. Was this the rehearsal or the performance? Did it make me the conductor or the marionette?

The door opened with ease, no creaking hinges that could serve as a forewarning, and a nurse I didn’t recognise came in. She gave me that soft, practiced smile all doctors knew and said, “Ready, Logan?” 

My legs stood from the bed until I was standing again. “Yeah,” I heard myself say. 

I had done what they wanted, ate the meals they gave me, swallowed the purple capsules, attended therapy sessions, and even flashed a half smile at the nurses I liked. They all looked at me that same way, even after I was apparently discharged; it wasn’t quite the tugging eyebrows of pity, but something else that suggested caution. As though I might might scream and break without warning—like I were less of a person and closer to a porcelain doll for them to sew back together and package home. It wasn’t their responsibility if I broke again on the way out. 

I followed the stranger nurse down the corridor where everything was white and yellow, like the building itself was trying to convince me of its inimitable recovery secretion. 

My mother was there at reception, the same as she had always been. She had that look on her face, her eyes wider, surveying me as if searching for a physicality to justify a sickness she couldn’t find by sight. She hugged me as I came closer and I was aware of the press of my body against hers. I was still smaller than her, as I hoped I would always be, but not as small as I once was. She took me home, where I stood in my bedroom again, the world here undisturbed by my own indistinguishable changing. I studied the bookcase I kept categorised by author, genre, and then height; I watched the ceiling fan spin slowly, even at its fastest speed, three blades splitting the air in perfect synchronisation. A thin spread of dust layered everything here, as though the house had blanketed itself during my absence. 

It didn’t happen all at once, just as it hadn’t that first time. The thoughts were still there, accompanying me always, but often they were harder to ignore than others. I don’t think I ever stopped counting the numbers on the plate, or forgot not to hate the movement in the reflection. I went to sessions with Nelson twice weekly, and then just once. People would tell me I looked better, like in putting on weight I was fixed. Cured. Mum wanted me to normal again, just as she thought I had been for sixteen years. Doctors wanted to find the cause—they’d interrogate me about my home life, if I’d been bullied at school, assaulted, watched too many runways… The thing was, I’d never had anything terribly bad happen to me. There was no single reason for me to have stopped eating. My family loved me. I had friends at school and teachers that would tell me what a great writer I’d make. Kids were mean sometimes, as they would always be. But mostly, I’d done this to myself, for myself.

It was November when they discharged me and I sat at the end of my own bed again. I looked at myself and the celestial moon t-shirt that clung too much to my body, imaging the rolls of my stomach spilling out like a carpet, staining the floor with frothing, bubbling, begrime acid. 

“Have you been eating more like we talked about?” Nelson would ask me during our sessions.

“Yes.” The lies came easier now, slipping from my tongue and clawing out from the cracks between my teeth smoothly.

She would then ask me what I was having for breakfast, what I’d eaten at dinner last night or what I’d be cooking later. 

“Two pieces of toast,” I said today, “with half an avocado and fried eggs.”

She’d give me that pleased, tight smile and then say something about how glad she was to hear it. I’d adjust my seating on the leather couch and tell myself if I was lighter, or at least just back at my old weight, it wouldn’t squeak so loud. 

“You weren’t eating enough to keep your body going,” Nelson continued to say. “As a young woman, that kind of strain can have serious consequences, Logan.”

I knew the speech from memory, how they’d tell me I’d lose my period, be hospitalised again, how my hair would fall out, I wouldn’t be able to have children, or I’d faint or my organs would start to fail. How I was killing myself.

“What I am trying to say is you have control right now.” She started to look weird, not dissimilar to staring at the horizon on a hot day and watching cars in the distance ripple like inflatable tube men, and I didn’t know if that was because I hadn’t eaten since last night or if I’d been so intent on trying to maintain eye contact and not wriggle or fidget that I couldn’t see straight anymore. “When you make poor decisions other people can take that control away from you–your parents, teachers, doctors. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“I know,” I mumbled, hearing my monotone voice whimper through the silence.

Two years ago, three, that might have been enough to make me quit.

I walked out and into reception where Mum was waiting, a gardening magazine open on her lap. There was a woman in the seat opposite holding a bald, pale, shapeless figure, rocking it softly in her arms as it screeched and cried. I wondered if the baby’s mother knew she’d be sitting in this waiting room, fifteen or so years later, because her child wanted to kill themselves. 

“What should I make for dinner?” Mum inquired when we got back in the car.

In this world, everything was about food. We even constructed time around it.

“I don’t know.” 

I didn’t speak again. 

At school, I walked up the stairs and into the main hallway where my shoes hit the floor loudly. It was like a violation, my loudness. It was like a ghost being able to open a door instead of sink through the walls. I passed classes of kids. I didn’t look at them. 

When I arrived at my own classroom, my friends didn’t ask why I was late and I didn’t tell them. I just took out my workbook and pencil case, listened to the teacher talking about the inner workings of an apparent lump of neurons inside my head, and took my own notes. Mr. Haloy was the kind of guy that was way too enthusiastic to be talking about the function of the hindbrain. Imagine my hindbrain shut down right there while I was sitting at my desk and I stopped breathing and blinking and doing anything. 

“Have you found a dress for formal yet?” Pia asked me. 

The school dance was less than a month away and by that time I had planned to reach my goal weight. I couldn’t have accounted for the time in the hospital that set me back three weeks. It meant I had twenty-three days to undo what they had done to me.

“Nah,” I said. Yes, I thought. I’d had a dress in mind all year and told myself I’d by it when I reached forty-eight.

Pia: “I’m thinking of wearing this one.”

She showed it to me on her laptop. I don’t like it. “That’s pretty,” I said aloud.

“…Think you’d look great in something flowy,” Pia went on, her voice light and casual, like she wasn’t addressing a ticking bomb. “Maybe light blue? It’d match your eyes.”

I nodded at the sound of her voice but didn’t bring myself to mumble a reply. The collar of my polo grazed the skin of my neck as I grew aware of my shoes pressing against the tops of my feet and the stray wisps of hair falling from my ponytail. Outside, a basketball bounced unceremoniously, accompanied by some boys screeching at each other down the hall. The world seemed to me an ejection of disordered stimuli building over each of my senses until the bell announced my release.

By the time I was home again the house hummed with stillness. Mum would be back by five, and my sister some time in the evening. I opened the fridge and regarded its contents, like if I stared long enough the food my disappear on its own.

A yogurt cup sat on the top shelf, undisturbed since Mum brought it home yesterday. I grabbed a teaspoon and sat down with it at the bench, peeling the lid back and dipping the spoon in, letting my taste buds recognise the cold tangy sweetness on my tongue before spitting it into the sink. The guilt burrowed in immediately, bitterly familiar, crawling from thoughts in my head that berated greed and settling in my stomach, but it was better this way. Safer.

Down the hallway, my room in its place, I watched the figure in the mirror as she turned to the side and lifted up the front of her shirt, stepped closer, inspected her stomach, and dug fingers into the softness of her skin. I stared longer, measuring, calculating, punishing. My stomach, the tops of my thighs and sides of my arms—none of it belonged to me. This body was a mould carved without my permission.

The yogurt cup was still on the counter. I thought about it sitting there, a half-empty crime scene I couldn’t erase. I wanted my mum, but she couldn’t understand this. I wanted Dad or a god to beg and weep to. Someone to understand and tell me all I had done myself could be fixed. Instead, I stared at my hands, at the faint indents on my fingers where I’d dug too hard into my skin. The marks faded fast. Nothing lasted, not even the pain I tried inflicting on myself.

I wasn’t better. The thought arose violently, hurtfully. My body looked healthy but my mind was right back where I started. I had never left that room in the ward, not really. Soon it would be December, and then, somehow, another year was gone. New year, same old me. Same mindless girl dressing herself up as a woman and hoping that if she spoke the right way, straightened her hair enough, and hid the ugly pieces of her body behind fabric, the world might not see her as disgustingly as she saw herself.

The clock in the hall ticked on. I let it.