This piece was first published in issue twenty-nine. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

I’m back from university for a weekend and convinced my brother has grown at least five inches since we last spoke. Nobody is home, and I decide to spend the evening alone with a stack of old videotapes. The timer at the bottom of the screen tells me it’s the year 2000, and we’re on a family holiday in Walt Disney World.
My brother is barely two years old. All cupid curls and gnashing gums, his little legs are barely able to keep up with his feet as he stumbles down the path, laughing and falling. The camera swerves. I come into view, swinging an armband-clad arm like a propeller. I’m desperate to shield my prepubescent body from the unforgiving lens, so I run.

My voice is high-pitched and childlike, but the self-loathing script spilling from my mouth is startlingly adult. “Mummy, stop it! I’m fat! Please, Mummy! I’m so fat.”
When I tire of running, I hunch over in defeat. The curves are premature and I flatten them with my fists when no one is looking, rolling puppy fat into perfect little sausage shapes. I do this a lot, imagining how simple things would be if I could just cut it all off with the scissors my mother uses to make paper garlands when it snows.

There are moments when I slip back into the throes of childhood. We’re at the water park now, and I’m re-enacting Titanic with my father, screaming, “There’s a boat, Jack!” He disappears beneath the man-made tide, re-emerges as a shark. I eat ice cream laced with sprinkles for dessert that night.

Within weeks of my eighth birthday, though, I’m throwing my packed lunch in the bin, ignoring the tug of guilt that arises when I think of “the starving children in Africa” my mother casually mentions at dinner, even though every move of her own fork is meticulous and calculated. No one mentions the diet pills hidden behind the Calpol and the Disney princess plasters because it’s just what we do. What women do.

It’s only when I see the tape that I experience a moment of stunning clarity. I realise I’m no different from the little girl standing uncomfortably in her Minnie Mouse swimsuit. I’m still tirelessly attempting to remould my body like it’s made of plasticine, and I lie to my partner when he notices my ribs are protruding. I can’t tell anyone I’ve become a fugitive again, creeping into my shared kitchen late at night to reluctantly shovel cereal into my mouth. I can’t tell anyone that I download menus weeks in advance, performing a kind of warped risk-assessment. No one knows I’ve shed tears in changing rooms and other people’s bathrooms, that I’m twenty years old and scared of what a sandwich will “do” to me.
I realise I have a problem worth solving, and the tape gives birth to an act of defiance. I do it for the little girl, because I am so very sorry, and because she deserves more than this, like we all do.

First published in Oh Comely Issue Twenty-Nine

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