Marissa is in despair before they’ve even left the first changing room.
“Hey, Mariss, try this…” Her cousin Tasha throws yet another dress into the cubicle, and Marissa feels her heart sinking as she looks at it: a flapper-style vision of sequins and beads and bold stripes.
After months of struggle, she has returned to her pre-anorexia weight, but her body doesn’t look the same as it once did – possibly because she’s a couple of years older now, and the process of puberty has continued, despite her best attempts to thwart it.
Fat doesn’t sit in the same places as it once did.
The jeans she used to wear look all wrong on her – the legs are too short, the waist is too tight. Dresses are hopelessly loose around her chest, but sit uncomfortably around her hips. If she tries going a size up, the dresses are more accommodating at the hips, but the chest area looks more baggy than ever. Some of the skintight tops Tasha has thrown into her cubicle sit well around her chest and shoulders, but draw too much attention to the bulge around her tummy – a bulge she knows isn’t immense, by any stretch of the imagination, but is there nonetheless. Doctors had taken pains to stress that just because fat was returning to certain areas, she was not to panic over that, She’s not obese, she’s a healthy weight now – and health means having a store of fat.
Stock image
Marissa is trying to be okay with that, but she can’t help letting her thoughts drift back to last year, when she had no stomach bulge whatsoever for months – when she was at her worst – and although she has vowed never to let herself get back to that awful, dark, obsessive place, she is severely tempted to skip lunch today, and dinner, and every other meal after that for the foreseeable future…
She had wanted today to be different. She had wanted to finally ditch her anorexic uniform of baggy black sweatshirts and drawstring pants. She had wanted to stop hiding herself away. She had wanted to do this shopping trip and get some new clothes to help her become a little more confident, a little more at ease with her changed body. But nothing fits properly. Nothing looks right. They should never have come here.
She is on the verge of tears.
Tasha pulls back the curtain, grinning, to reveal that she is wearing the same sequinned dress she’s just handed to Marissa. “Look! We can be dress twins, come on…”
Her face falls as she registers Marissa’s expression.
“I look like shit, Tash,” Marissa says flatly. “I look like shit in everything. I just want to go home…”
“No, no, no, Mariss,” Tasha exclaims, stricken, as she steps into the cubicle and pulls the curtain firmly behind her. “You can find the right clothes, okay? You can. Listen, I got this dress because it has adjustable straps, see? And the front – gorgeous!”
What Marissa envies most about her cousin is her confidence, how sure of herself she seems to be. She is bright and vivacious. She doesn’t second-guess herself – she doesn’t question every little thing she says and does, or agonise over worst-case scenarios in her mind.
Tasha is fearless.
A response to the freewrite prompt not obese.