Sometimes, I miss my thigh gap, though not very often. 

Only when someone asks if I still dance do I begin to remember how to hate my body. I close my eyes and visualize the ornate leotards I grew up in, how they hugged my ribs so finely when I sucked in my stomach so hard I forgot how to breathe. I can almost feel the negative space between my bones again, how the contours of my empty body glistened under the fluorescent studio lights. Only then do I remember how it felt to be a feather of a girl, hollowed-out and weightless in pointe shoes on black marley. And as I become lost in the enigma that I once was, the innocent twelve-year-old dancer emerges out of these joys that I’ve learned to call suffering, and I watch the ballet instructor teach the girl the art of self-hatred and starvation. 

I watch the mirrors warp the shape of her body. I watch food slowly disappear from her plate. I listen closely as the blonde instructor teaches the girl to not only perfect her technique but her physique as well. 

“You should not have enough fat on your body to have boobs or a butt.” 

Challenge accepted. 

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Sometimes, I miss my thigh gap. 

While I watch my parents gleam as they tell the story of my birth, I remember what it was like to be skinny. I can’t ignore the tinge of pride in their voice recalling the four-pound bundle of emptiness I was, so small that I scared the doctors. So small that I had to wear preemie clothes as a full-term baby. So small that doctors said to gorge me with avocado and butter, yet I was raised on fat-free milk and turkey bacon and learned to love the thinness that my doctors feared. And as this bundle of emptiness learned to crawl and walk and count far too early, I blurred the lines between love and addiction. 

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I miss my thigh gap. 

I finally uninstalled my calorie-tracking apps the other day—not because I really wanted to, but because I needed the space on my phone. There were five of them. I didn’t even know I had that many. I know that they had long overstayed their welcome, but I kept them for sentimental reasons. Like how I surrender myself to jasmine green tea once in a while, for sentimental reasons, or how I still don’t eat donuts. For sentimental reasons. 

Body, please know there was sentiment behind your starvation. This was not reckless endangerment—no, I meticulously followed the instruction manual. Your destruction was carefully calculated for your benefit. 

I know I didn’t ask for permission, so I beg for forgiveness. 

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My thigh gap. 

The clump of hair glares back at me from the shower drain, and I feel judged by everything I’ve denied and stripped and carved from myself to be this thin which is never thin enough. How much does a strand of  hair weigh? Perhaps I’ll never know, which is why they fall in fistfuls to their deaths on the shower floor. 

The showerhead, never ceasing its fire of frigid bullets against my bare back, steals any warmth left from  my body. Showers are supposed to be warm, and girls aren’t supposed to starve themselves, and girls aren’t supposed to take cold showers to burn off the extra calories because they forgot to starve themselves. And so I cry. My tears, the only source of warmth in this icebox, are the futile flashlight in miles of blackout because this eternal coldness has haunted my bones for the last nine months. Not even my tears can warm me. So my tears flow with the freezing water and fall down the drain with my hair and plague me like the colds and flus and thoughts of death I can’t seem to shake.

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My thigh gap. 

28 hours. I haven’t eaten in over 28 hours, I tell him. A new record, I tell him. This fatal silence alone could feed me for days. 

And I know in this moment that I will have the misfortune of always knowing that there is no proper way to respond to a girl when she tells you she’s starved herself into oblivion. Yet my words linger as an answerless riddle awaiting the answer that’s inevitably wrong. 

So he tells me to eat, but I don’t eat. And he probably tells me he loves me or some bullsh*t like that to convince me to eat, but I don’t eat. I learn to swallow the innocent lies and half-hearted concern, and the sweet taste of this power play is enough to feed me. 

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My thigh gap. 

The mirror scrutinizes my body, deciding which version of me to reflect today: the skinny girl, the fat girl, the battered girl, the mask. My body takes up far too much space inside the mirror’s rounded borders, so I condemn my body for taking up any space at all. The mirror, angered by my audacity to exist in its presence, spits out the version of me I’ve grown to expect. 

Delicate bones thrust themselves forward from behind my pale skin, and I devour them with my gaze, preying on any proof of suffering. I count my ribs with ease. As the empty space between my bones whispers my name, I feel a sick pride as I visualize him sliding his fingers between the depressions of my ribcage. I feel the twisted satisfaction of knowing how easily he could break my body. 

My unmade bed meets my body as I throw myself onto the pillows, fantasizing about his body on top of mine, pressing me down into a void, forcing me out of existence all together. I imagine him suffocating me with the pillows, or snapping my spine, or doing anything to coax the life out of me before I can’t outrun the hunger anymore. I can only hope he kills me before I do. 

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Sometimes, I miss my thigh gap, though not very often. 

Only when she trails the tips of her fingers across my skin do I begin to forget how I’ve hated my body. I close my eyes and quiet my mind as she entangles her hands in my hair, extracting the hatred and sorrow and guilt from me until there is nothing left except our two bodies in a sweet air of silence. I am more than skin and bones beneath her hands, and I wish for her to do anything but break my body because she holds me in a way as if to say that skin and bones were never meant to be broken. And in this infinite moment of unutterable emotion, I know I am forgiven. 

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