ISSUE I: P(art) of the Soul

PROSE
By JOSE DA ROCHA
her again, through the clothes she
wore.
Although maybe the past is better
left undisturbed. I never liked the
person I was during secondary
school. She had a questionable taste
in clothes, music and friends, and
was altogether volatile and far too
sensitive for her own good. It’s only
in coming out the other side, as it
were, that I can recognise how things
were. My Snapchat memories show
me photos of a girl whose skin looks
swollen, turgid like an overwatered
plant. Her eyelashes are long;
obscenely long, my sister says, but
the eyes look a blink away from tears.
I can feel her weariness through the
screen.
There was a part of me for a long
time which believed that my life
would be better, in all ways, if I
was thinner. I would be confident,
I would be desirable, I would no
longer worry about things because
I would have far less to worry about.
And I am more confident now. But
the source of this confidence is a bit
of a mystery; it has very little to do
with my measurements. A lot of the
time I don’t think about it. Strange
now that I’ve ‘done it’, per se, that
I’m a standard size 12, that I don’t
care at all. Well, not at all, but far less
than I thought I would. When I went
up to a size 14 it was the worst thing
in the world. When I went up to a 16
it was worse again. Both my sisters
have always been slim - slimmer
than me, at any rate, which was not
difficult. Neither of them was a size
14. This meant the end of hand-medowns
and signalled the new era of
hand-me-ups. My sister, who is four
years older than me, got my clothes
when I outgrew them. I thought it
was funny, and then I didn’t.
My diagnosis was a relief; it wasn’t
just me and my terrible eating habits.
It was my hormones. It was beyond
my control. There was something
larger and more menacing afoot
than the fact that I ate a frankly
ludicrous amount of pasta. Now I
can’t really eat pasta at all, which is
perhaps one of the greatest tragedies
of my life. I have no appetite
anymore. There’s also the danger
that anything I eat, which may have
previously had no effect at all, will
now trigger a migraine or nausea
or both. I’ve never, luckily, been
prone to migraines, but I am now.
The nausea has gone down since I’ve
gone off the pill, but the migraines
haven’t gone anywhere. Nobody,
not the doctor, not the consultant,
not the dermatologist (although that
would have been a very long shot)
has anything helpful to say about it.
It’s just a thing that happens to some
people, said the consultant when
I told her, and the medication can
exacerbate it. You’ll need to watch
out for triggers. Except that I haven’t
the slightest notion of what triggers
them. Maybe I should hire somebody
to just sit and observe me for days on
end, come to me at the end of a week
with a notepad of comments and all
my problems will be solved. Until
then, it’s Minesweeper.
Medicated weight loss is a strange
and uncomfortable thing. Since I
began taking Metformin I’ve lost
over two stone. I fit into size 12 jeans
again, which I absently thought
would never happen. I probably have
to buy a load of new bras. Nearly
every tweak to my body has been
for mechanical reasons. I got braces
because my adult eye teeth grew in
behind my front teeth, and I was
going to end up with no canines
at all if nothing was done. I'm on
medication that causes me to lose
weight because its main function is to
lower the risk of developing type two
P
A
G
E
15
BMDDIGITAL.COM