Fifty-Eight Kilograms

I’m not a tall woman, quite short. Muscular build, shoulders broad. But I’ve weighed about fifty-eight kilograms since I was twelve. The fat migrated (to more flattering quarters, I hope) but the number itself has held.

I take a sip or two (or a cheeky three) of Lupilus, wolf down the frothy beer head, and pull the photos, matte finish, from the paper envelope once more. Browse through them, careful to hold only the edges, not to smudge the surface (you know, as though they’re worth preserving, worth remembering – they’re not). They came out quite well, though, and of twenty-six memories, there are but three of me. Turns out I’m uglier than my self-concept dared believe. You know how everybody thinks they’re a seven? If the photos mean anything, I’m a four.

Strawberry wafts over my table, milky white threads coiling in the air. Owner, a man in black, lips suck-suck-puckered around a vape. He’s a six but likely considers himself a seven. He catches my eye, as though I’d said it aloud, and so I bury my face once more in matte finish memories I’d rather forget – places and faces, all transient.

She’s chunky and awkward (me, I mean, though third person preserves my dignity). Pasty face, she’s got, as though her head were dunked in PVA glue – you know, the kind that dries like a second skin. The kind we peeled off our palms in primary before we hated ourselves. I laugh it off, though, which I’ve been doing for a decade. A decade of ignoring store windows and train doors and elevator mirrors in case I glimpse something I dislike. Or, God forbid, I like what I see and am caught indulging my vanity. Vain, the word has long been attached to my name, and so I’ve made myself smaller, quieter, uglier. Chopped off all my hair once when somebody paid me a compliment. I mean, fifty-eight kilograms of conceit, it’s hardly digestible.

Another photo. I’d begun to think I was petite, self-image always fluctuating, but there I am, flesh pooling out of clothes too small. And I can hear that carnivorous voice again, its teeth stained red, the voice that once devoured me, once made me jam my fingers down my throat, made me chew my food and spit it out, made me cry over a sugar-coated pill. I silenced that voice over a decade ago, but perhaps she has been merely muzzled, for I fear she still bites, teeth gnashing behind this flimsy chicken wire contraption I thought would hold.

Merely muzzled, for I feel her hot breath again, somewhere beneath my laughter, as my matte thighs taunt me in their enormity. Yet I swear only yesterday, I thought my thighs too thin. I can’t see myself. One day I’m gorgeous, and I cry for not having acknowledged it; the next, I’m an ogre harbouring illusions, watering cabbage and calling it a garden, mistaking root maggots for caterpillars.

Just last year I saw a pretty woman in a restaurant. Restaurants, they stir my social anxiety, because there, fat, clumsy little me does not belong. But when I did muster the courage to enter that evening, into that incandescent marmalade jar, I saw a woman in the very back of the room—a woman who belonged—and that woman was me in an inconspicuous floor-to-ceiling mirror. Who’d have known that for a millisecond I would witness myself with newborn eyes and admire what I saw?

But there’s no trace of that woman in these photos, and the dissonance screeches somewhere in my head, somewhere where self-image is conceived. I take another sip of beer—no, fuller—a mouthful.

And I wish, for your sake, dear reader, there were a call to action somewhere in this story, something small and symbolic, something to anchor you. Maybe I could examine digital copies instead and still decide to print them (too bad I already have). Perhaps I could order a light beer? You know, to reveal this rekindled insecurity. Maybe I could go home and throw out all my clothes – starting with those sorry Spartan sandals.

But my angst, like me, has aged, and I’m hardly dysregulated enough for my chaos to thus externalise itself. Anticlimactic, I know – wouldn’t you rather I rip my clothes from their hangers, and sit sobbing in a circle of tank tops? But my chaos, nowadays, merely wafts around inside me like smoke (strawberry?) because insecurity exists in ordinary instances, heavy and suffocating instances that cling to our clothing. And we must merely sit with it, breathe it in, this second-hand humiliation. When did society decide it was embarrassing to be ugly or overweight or imperfect? And why do my cheeks rouge with shame? Only recently, I’d admired the curve of my hips, wishing the younger me had known I’d settle into these fifty-eight kilograms. That this flesh, it would find its shape without my meddling, without sculptor or scalpel.

I rise to leave, and nobody stops me – not the six in black, not the seven, not the eight. Nobody grabs my wrist, nobody says anything revelatory, nobody has an epiphany (not me, at least) and nothing happens, really. Just the pedestrian light turning green, rhythmic beeping. Me crossing the road, fleeting eye contact with a heavy-browed driver, and off I go with my memories tucked neatly in my purse.

I wander down Rue Nationale—leaves shuddering in shades of green—where I glimpse fifty perfectly imperfect faces which, each and every one, tell a story that cannot be measured by the golden ratio – no good book is. There exist other metrics, and no measuring tape could wrap around even an atom of my soul, nor a scale weigh even an ounce of my heart – yes, my heart, the elephant of hearts. All these numbers applied to things immeasurable… as though we were contained within.

A man’s face, bespectacled, lips plump but asymmetrical. Imperfection does not disqualify us from love but rather renders us eligible. He smiles a crooked smile, which I return.

Another face, another flaw,

Another face, another flaw,

And I realise I’m fine just as I am in these ill-fitting clothes, mind like flesh pooling out of ill-fitting standards.