Gummy Worm

     I weighed myself today.  ::Sigh::  I shouldn't have done that.  ::Cringe::  So I tucked my scale away into the recesses of my bathroom closet.  I guess that's a good thing that I put it away, that I recognized and attempted to prevent the destructive force of that inanimate object from draining the reason from my brain.  But hiding the scale doesn't hide the number I saw there or the flood of panic and depression that followed.  I'm tired of caring, of giving a shit what that number is.  Why should that number define me?  I am not a prisoner anymore...my weight is no longer my mark of identification.  Yet, tired as I am, as much as I don't want to, I do care.  I do still care what that number says.  I do still feel the anxious hesitation and fear of stepping onto the scale's cold platform as though I am ascending a diving board whilst a rapt audience awaits the gracious descent.  Yet the only plunge that follows is my heart as it plummets into my gut when the number appears, when it flashes black and ominous in front of my eyes, and I look down on it in shame.  As I woke this morning, I wasn't going to do it.  I told myself not to.  I asked myself what was the worst that could happen if I left the house and went about my day without weighing in.  I settled on the answer that the curiosity would kill me, and I didn't want to die that day.  So up I went, plunge goes the heart, and away it went, banished to the closet.   
     As I put the scale away, an intense feeling rose up inside me.  My fingers burned as I gripped the edges of the cool glass.  And I realized it was hate that I was feeling.  It was rage.  And for a split second I thought of taking that menacing square of glass and smashing it into shards on my kitchen floor to prove I was in control, to prove I had the power.  (How fitting.)  But something prevented me from doing it, something that felt like love, like forgiveness and fear.  Was that something the crippling dependency of my disease?  Should I have smashed it rather than half-assedly hid it?  Or would it have even mattered?
     I approach the mirror with trepidation, craning my neck until it hurts in order to view my backside.  That feeling rises within me again...the feeling of an intense and immense rage, of hate.  It scares me the level of virulence with which I despise myself in moments like these.  Moments in which I grab my flesh between my fingers and tug on it, maneuver it flat, and tuck it away to catch a glimpse of the bones that lay beneath.  But when I let go, the health bounces back into position and I close my eyes shut imagaining weightlessness, how I had it and how I let it go.  And as the weight of my considerations bear down upon my consciousness, I deliberate the deal I made with the Devil: sacrifice my skeleton in exhange for happiness and the hand of a loving friend.  Now my body is a gummy worm, a body with no bones.  I should have asked for an erasure of memory along with the disappearance of my ghost.
     I open my eyes to see myself encapsulated within the confines of the mirror's glistening edges and feel my knees go weak.  I feel the tears begin to well up behind my eyes.  And the frightened little girl inside of me begs for me to take her home, to curl up with her in a corner and stay there until she's skinny enough to be visible through my skin.  She wheedles and whines that she can be my friend instead, that she's all I need for happiness.  I search my reflection, trying to put a face to the voice of that little girl and wonder why she's too cowardly to look me in the eye, why I can only ever hear her, never see her.