How to Lose 82 Pounds in 2 Hours

Trigger warning: eating disorder.

My friends kept telling me it’s normal for me to feel this way, that they googled “five stages of grief” and bargaining was the second one. I haven’t talked to them in four weeks. I’m still counting. It’s not that they hurt me or anything - but I just think they’re wrong. I think it’s not that simple, and I think that nothing about any of this is normal. Sure, maybe your grandparents died, or maybe your parents died and you’re an adult, and you’re going through the five stages of grief written in monotones on Google. That’s normal, isn’t it? But this isn’t. Nothing about this is normal. Nothing about this will ever be normal.

I hate this house. I hate the silence that hangs over everything like fog, the way Mom and Dad don’t get angry at me anymore, that time I woke up and Dad was crying over me, holding my hand, telling me I was the only kid he had left, and he’d never let me go. I hate that all the pictures of her were quietly taken away, how first they were turned around to face the wall and then they disappeared and it’s like we’re trying to forget her or something. I hate that I keep accidentally setting the table for four and the whole meal we all pretend we’re not staring at the empty plate. I keep my head down when I pass by her doorway so that I can pretend I don’t think about it all the time, about her cold bedroom, still messy from that day when we were in a rush to leave and she couldn’t find any clothes she wanted to wear. None of us have cleaned it since, even though Mom kept reprimanding her for the state of her room - none of us could really bring ourselves to pick up the clothes from the floor, to close all the opened palettes of eyeshadow and blush, to neatly arrange the schoolbooks into rows on her desk. Because we would be undoing the evidence of her living, the tiny legacy she managed to leave on the world in the eighteen years she got to live. Because we know that once we tidy that room, she will never come back to mess it up again. 

And the truth is that I didn’t mean to come here, didn’t mean to quietly pick my way through the crinkled shapes of skirts and socks, taking little breaths of the way her room still smells - that perfume she was obsessed with, the one that we all hated because it smells like chemicals, the one that she’d spray all over her room so that everything smelled like the way you’d expect plastic roses to smell - like a flower, but not quite, like something made in a factory. I try to keep my breaths short, so as not to exhaust it, so that the smell stays for just a little longer, so that we can all pretend she still lives here for a little longer. This is the only place where there are still pictures of her up on the walls, polaroids from her camera of her pouting her lips with her friends, trashy drugstore eyeliner almost reaching her temples. The truth is that I didn’t mean to come here because I know I’m not supposed to, not supposed to invade on a dead girl’s privacy because I know she’d kick out her nosy little brother if she was still alive, slapping my hands away from her stuff.

I know it sounds stupid but I wish I knew her better. I feel guilty that I don’t know things like who her crush was, or what her favorite shade of eyeshadow was or something. I feel guilty that I have no idea what that girl in purple lipstick is called - the one standing in the polaroid taped in front of her desk, the picture Amy wrote “BESTIE” under in sparkly gel pen. I feel guilty that I didn’t know she dreamed of becoming a model, that I didn’t care about the fashion magazines Amy’d buy with the salary from her shift, the ones that pile up in the corner of her room. I’m trying to notice things about her. To make up for it, I guess, somehow. There’s moonlight streaming in through the window and I hope no one else is awake. I pick up one of the magazines, hoping to find some bookmarks or dog-eared pages Amy left, some clue as to who she was, who she wanted to be. I go through each of them, wishing I could hear her shout at me to get out, wishing her voice in my head still had a face attached to it. In the middle of the pile, shoved inconspicuously between two magazines, is a notebook. There is nothing written or doodled on the cover, none of the heart-shaped stickers she was obsessed with. It almost feels like it shouldn’t belong to her.

I flip it open and taped to the first page is a polaroid of herself standing in front of her mirror, wearing the navy blue bathing suit we bought that time for going to the beach. The date written over it is from three years ago. Underneath, in neat handwriting: 138 pounds. Still a fatty. Heard I’m 21^th on the boys’ Would I Hit? it list. There’s nothing else written down, nothing that could indicate why she’d kept this diary, but I feel a small hint of recognition. Three years ago - that’s when she first started taping printed-out diets she’d screenshot from sketchy online magazines. I never noticed. No, I did notice - I never cared. I never asked her about it. Fuck.

The next page, a month later, another picture. 140 pounds. Fasting didn’t work, pigged out on the third day. Wanna die XD. Do I remember how she felt? Do I remember the afternoons when she’d come home glumly, when she’d cry in her room? Do I remember hearing the snap of her polaroid camera in her body-length mirror, the click of her pen on this very page? I wish I did. But I don’t remember anything. She always seemed the same, always stayed in her room or went out with “the girls,” swiping on her phone, and I never talked to her. I wish I remembered times when I asked her about her day, about talking about feelings and all that with her, but I really don’t. I wish I’d been the kind of little brother who knew all about her, who watched movies with her and knew the names of her friends. The kind of little brother who knew about this notebook.

Two months later. 135 pounds. Something’s working. Still working on the flab here though. Saw a hack online that teaches you how to vomit your food - love it already. There are doodles on the picture, circled areas in marker, lines on her waist, arms, and legs dictating how thin they should be. A printed out picture of someone’s Instagram is stuck next to her polaroid, with sparkles doodled around it, and over it is written: AFTER. I flip through the pages, my fingers trembling. Picture after picture after picture, arrows pointing at everything “wrong” with her body, the little number written under them shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. How couldn’t I have noticed? How the fuck could I, her own little brother, not have noticed it? It was the hoodies, some scared voice says in my head. It must have been the hoodies, the loose clothes she started wearing all the time, so that no one could see her body. It must have been those. But I hadn’t asked her about those, either. And in the pictures I watch her fade. I watch the shadows of her bones grow darker, her ribs clearer as they begin to protrude from her chest, her shape thinning away as the number falls: 126 pounds, 119 pounds, 94 pounds, faster and faster until the date comes closer to today. The last entry is from a week before the accident: 85 pounds. The girl in the picture doesn’t look my sister. She looks like my sister’s ghost.

Flashing black-and-white dots start appearing over my vision and I throw the notebook down, stumbling as quickly as I can to the bathroom as I retch into the dark toilet-bowl, the pressure forcing more tears and blood to my face. Because I can see the white car swerving into ours again through the windshield like a nightmare. Because I can hear the car crashing in my ears again, can feel the impact of the explosion on my skin, the intense burn on my lower back and legs as they seemed to melt away, Amy’s cut-off scream and the shards of glass lodged in my shoulder as I’m thrown onto my side and my head hits ruthless sun-hot asphalt. Because I can taste the burning tires in my mouth as the chemicals fill my nose, the crackling of the fire, because I remember screaming like I didn’t exist, screaming because I thought it was a dream and I always scream when this happens in my dreams, screaming when I didn’t wake up and I saw a pile next to me and it had Amy’s curly black hair. Part of her waist was missing, her clothes burned through to skin, skin to flesh, flesh to ribs, and there was the smell of meat cooking over it all: her cauterizing wound.

Amy, I screamed. Amy, what the fuck? I didn’t know why I was asking her. The sound of her breathing was painful to even listen to, the air rattling past her throat as she tried taking bigger gulps and I watched horrified as I realized the bulging shape in her wound was rising and falling with her breaths.

Does my- she paused again, out of breath, sweat beading all over her brow. Does my waist look thin like this?

I started laughing hysterically, but when I stopped the shape in her wound wasn’t bulging anymore and her pupils were slowly leaking into her irises.

I woke up in the hospital thinking it had been a nightmare until I saw the shapes of Mom and Dad crying over my bed. Mom kept apologizing, saying that she should have been there, that she should have driven us there instead of making Amy drive when we all knew that she barely passed her driving test, and she was crying and holding my hands so tight it hurt. I just wanted her to be quiet, for them both to leave, for me to be back in my room without all this pain on my body, watching all of this happen in a movie or something.

It took her two hours to turn from a corpse to ash. The next time I saw my sister she was in a small box with cherry blossoms blooming over it, her smiling picture in a huge frame in a church hung with white flowers, surrounded by faces hung with tears, everyone in black clothes, and I wanted to laugh again because all of it felt like a joke. I left to smoke with my friends but they wouldn’t even crack a smile at my “fume-eral” puns. It just felt itchy and uncomfortable, like I was supposed to cry, even though I didn’t feel like it.

That was before the nightmares, the flashbacks, the sound of her voice in my head, that time I saw her behind me in the mirror, that time I got drunk and hacked my room down with an axe and collapsed crying in the wooden splinters that were once my bed. I look back at her door, which I stupidly left open, and then farther at the little wooden box sitting on a pedestal in the living room. Isn’t that hilarious? Amy became living room decor. We took away all of her pictures but we set her burnt corpse next to the TV like a nice vase, as if that hurts less. I take the polaroid camera in its plastic case from Amy’s shelf - it’s pretty, so she kept it out somewhere visible - and snap a picture of the little box, the carved cherry blossoms caught by the moonlight, and the little picture sheet rises from the slit along the side of the camera, buzzing. The tape is in the kitchen drawer; a pen from my room. Returning to Amy’s messy room, I flip to the last page of her notebook, sticking my polaroid onto the page, writing down the date, and a caption.

2.6 pounds. Do you think it’s enough yet, Amy?

I do.