1. The first confession Mom ever made in my presence was not spoken aloud. It was a side glance at her own reflection in the walk-in closet mirror, a pinch to the freckled flesh on her belly under the dim yellow light of a hanging bulb. I sat criss-cross applesauce on the floor and watched her stare at her body so carefully that she seemed to forget anyone else was in the room.

2. Mary Oliver said it. You do not have to be good. But the urge to be more than good is insidious—like a rogue red leaf in September, a single rotten strand of dough in the crust laid lattice on apple slices. I see it in the women on television and the women I imagine in my head, the girls on the little screen in my pocket that I know is killing me slowly.

3. I come to your races, sit in the sidelines. Cross country is the kind of sport nobody’s body really agrees with—I always witness at least one girl throwing up post finish-line, and a few more that collapse onto the muddy trail, limbs like twigs in shorts far too short for Chicago this time of year. I try not to stare but the goosebumps on their thighs could be seen from the moon.

4. I observed every step of the ritual: Mom pinched her tummy again with the other hand and then sucked it all back in as she re-buttoned her jeans, lips curling like she’d tasted something sour. She tugged her navy blue blouse over the waistline and shifted her weight to stare from another angle. This is what women do, I heard in the creak of the floorboards under her feet.

5. And still, the worst part is that it always could’ve been worse.

6. I’m afraid of a lot of things, I admit to you. I’m afraid of Point Nemo, missing the party, 12oz half sweet matcha latte with almond milk (170, unless Starbucks has started using sweetened almond milk again. In that case, 190). I’m afraid you wouldn’t have loved me in a different body. I’m afraid you’ll see me cry as I halfway try to speak into the little box at the Taco Bell drive-thru on Baseline and Broadway.

7. The world’s first sin was a woman eating, technically speaking.

8. Mine was salivating through pink and purple braces at a portrait of Catherine of Siena and all the girls who grew into saints by folding their bodies back into nonbeing. Before there was bulimia or anorexia nervosa there was anorexia mirabilis (Latin for “miraculous”), coined in a 2013 American Journal of Psychiatry article to describe Catholic nuns in the Middle Ages who engaged in self-starvation as a form of religious piety. A history professor once told me he couldn’t decide if they were more feared or revered at the time, although I’m convinced there is never one without the other.

9. I was Grandma’s favorite. She and Grandpa fawned over lots of things—my line in the first grade production of The Smartest Giant in Town, my buck-toothed smile, how I played so nicely with my baby cousin Syd—but mostly how skinny I was. I could fit into a girls’ size six when I was nine and I weighed just as little as Mom did when she was my age and I quickly learned that this was kind of magical. Every time certain adults laid eyes on me I felt like a technicolor circus gazelle doing strange little tricks, except the only trick was existing in this body.

10. This body has always jumped to fill the void with food. And also to make myself empty, just to prove there was something to be taken away in the first place, that I’m not as vapid and hollow as I feel these days.

11. They never hid the food until I got fat.

12. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment took place at the University of Minnesota from November 19, 1944 to December 20, 1945. The purpose was to study the physiological effects of severe and prolonged food restriction and use the scientific findings to guide World War II famine relief efforts. Thirty-six healthy male participants were selected to lose 25% of their body weight in a matter of months before undergoing various rehabilitative diets and a monitored period of unguided, self-directed feeding at the end.

13. Freshman year of college I sat criss-cross on Lauren’s bed as she paced around the dorm room, socks shuffling against the industrial gray carpet. My cheeks were wet and my skull soft to the touch. Are you even attracted to me? She stopped, gave me a painfully earnest look. Well. I don’t really think people should be judged based on their genetics.

14. You are already flipping through the Emily Dickinson book from my nightstand when I walk back into the room. “Why is there just one poem flagged?” You touch the page and clear your throat. “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

15. My ancestors fled the Irish Potato Famine in 1846.

16. My ancestors fled the Irish Potato Famine so that I, two-hundred years later, could sit in group therapy and cry over a calorically unspecified serving of peanut M&M’s.

17. Your grandfather escaped the Holocaust as a hungry shell of himself. Whatever happened in my bloodline forever ago was a comparative papercut, so why is it you stuck with the task of consoling me in the restaurant bathroom? The irony feels so cruel that it makes me want to stop altogether, but I can’t (or I don’t) and I’m sorry.

18. Maria needed an outfit for her first date with the boy from Spanish class. I offered her my favorite white and yellow checkered pants from Madewell, which Grandma had encouraged me to buy as motivation over the summer, even though they were two sizes too small. Once every few weeks I’d try them on, feel a squeeze around my thighs and an uncomfortable cinch at the waist, and then fold them back up neatly to rest at the bottom of my dresser. They'd lie perfect and untouched until some clock ticking inside me said it was time to do it all over again.

19. I could’ve been a blade of grass. One day, I will probably be a blade of grass. How lucky am I to have arms and legs today?

20. During and after the Minnesota trial’s starvation phase, all thirty-six subjects were recorded engaging in new and abnormal behaviors during meals: hoarding food, stealing utensils, observing others eat with extreme fixation or repulsion, drastically increasing consumption of coffee, paper, chewing gum, pebbles, nicotine. One subject escaped from the lab on day forty-seven to buy two quarts of strawberry ice cream from a nearby grocery store, which he ate to completion on the side of the road.

21. (The subject was dismissed from the experiment for having deviated from the diet plan).

22. My friends ask, and what I remember about my first date after Lauren was the basket of Asian pears we bought at the farmer’s market. She took a bite as she complimented the bump on my nose that I’d always hated. It was careless and gorgeous, pear juice trickling out of her mouth and showering the skin in something sweet without it ever crossing her mind.

23. The line between loving someone and wanting to be someone is thin.

24. Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was born in Italy and engaged in the first fast when her parents tried to force a marriage between Catherine and her late older sister’s widower. The hunger strike frightened Catherine’s parents into calling off the engagement, but it also unleashed something much deeper: ecstatic visions of God laying a table for her in Heaven with all of the food she was meant to refuse on Earth. Catherine was so moved that she lived the last year of her life in a state of hungry delirium, subsisting only on Eurcharist wafers and occasionally the scabs that flaked the forearms of Lepers.

25. This body is temporary but patience can drain over a dish-encrusted sink.

26. This body is temporary but one time Richard Siken said that sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

27. The minute Maria slipped her lean calf into the right leg of my pants, I could tell they would swallow her whole. The checkered fabric seemed to love the copious amount of breathing room between her perfect muscular thighs, relaxing and billowing around her tiny body in a way it never could on mine. She needed a belt pulled to the tightest loop just to hold the pants up. I told her she looked beautiful, because it was true.

28. Maria and Lauren left me for each other, so Mom bought me a gym membership.

29. Subjects at Minnesota reported feeling despondent, apathetic, irritable. They frequently dreamt about food in some capacity and often felt guilty for it.

30. “You look so good!”

31. I made myself so small and everyone but you noticed.

32. “You look unwell.”

33. Isn’t this what you wanted.

34. By my nineteenth fall, I was buying scales in cold hard cash and letting my insides spill out into moonlit parking lots, basement bathrooms, and anywhere else I could get away with it. The following winter, I entered treatment.

35. How does anyone get back on the right side of themself?

36. In her last year, Catherine of Siena stopped swallowing water and lost the use of her legs. She levitated during prayer and dripped holy oil from her fingertips. Some said she could heal wounds with her saliva and lactate even though virginal; could keep it tight with a minimal workout routine and intermittent keto fasting and cheat day buccal fat removal. The clergy praised her for holy restraint until it crossed some invisible line, probably when she cut her hair down to its roots and started giving away all of her clothes.

37. And then they ordered her to eat.

38. Eventually they tried to force feed her.

39. In a dying breath Catherine shoved a stick down her throat.

40. Progress is slow because it’s the kind of thing that happens in your bones.

41. Progress is slow because it means you have to take the metaphorical tiger out of the cage for six walks a day (three meals, three snacks). It’s been a year of this routine, and we’re still learning how to trust each other.

42. The only book I finished at the hospital was Roxane Gay’s memoir, Hunger. One of the unit therapists deemed it too triggering to bring out in public areas, so I replaced the hardcover book jacket with the one from my copy of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and brought it everywhere with me for three weeks. My throat still gets tight when she folds our lives into one line: I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do.

43. Fifty years later, researchers interviewed nineteen of the former participants about the long-term effects of their starvation. The majority of men recalled binge eating and other dietary schisms in the early refeeding stage. For some it continued indefinitely. Two subjects reported that they’d started purging religiously as old men and another was hospitalized for gastric distension, an irreparable rupture of the stomach. He died three days later.

44. Progress is slow but we can sit on your porch and share the pesto grilled cheese I made for us while we talk about Adrienne Rich, the multiverse, the tomatoes I want to grow this summer. You brush breadcrumbs off my chin and I only think about your hands. We joke about how two things can be true at once: how everything up until now has felt like a bruise, but tonight God cracked honeycomb over our temples and stained the sky creamsicle yellow, ritual pink, a blue so tender it melts under the tongue. I’m glad I’m here to taste it with you.

45. Saint Catherine’s devotees wanted to smuggle part of her corpse out of Rome to bring back to Siena, so they severed her head and carried it in a bag to the city gates. When the guards stopped them for a luggage inspection, they opened the bag upside down. A flurry of rose petals fell out.

46. Someone once told me the atoms that make up our bodies are 99% empty space. I still want to know how we grow so full of love; so dense with pain.

Bella Gibb is a poet, essayist, and student at Northwestern University. Her work has been featured in Eunoia Review, Cornell's Rainy Day Magazine, Grain of Salt Magazine, and Points in Case, and she's currently working on a novel in verse about troubled teenage girls attending a wilderness boot camp in Utah. When she's not writing she's defiling her digital footprint (@bellelathorne_ on Twitter) or thinking about which former US presidents were probably a little bit gay.