Students Diary: A Story of a Young Girl – Part 2

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A change of station, a change of environment brings with it a change of perceived coping mechanisms, one evening looking out the dorm room window on a top floor as the white flakes of snow flutter gently from above creating a cushy pristine pillow on the ground below, a new thought arises within her. She stands there for hours building up the courage to lean forward, but alas she cannot for within her mind is a savage battle being fought about the validity of her actions and the fear of even more pain, the what if pile up, a broken neck, broken limbs and yet still left alive, the enormity of being left paralysed, disabled, the look of horror and disappointment in her on her father’s face.

All that money spent to cultivate a mind to be wasted on the possibility of broken bones, the numerous airplane tickets from continents to continents; she simply could not do it, she simply had to find another way to extinguish her inner demons. The availability of extra pocket money created within her a new diversion, while most of her peers spent theirs on girly magazines, makeup, hair products, frilly underwear, wonder bras, the sounds of the latest music sensations on their playlists and outings to cinemas, clubs as well as contraband and sneaked cigarettes and alcoholic beverages,

She spent her’s on  prodigiously eating away her feelings like the  pavlovian dog reacting to stimulus by trying to suffocate them, with the allure of creamy chocolates, custard creams, sticky toffee puddings, rice puddings, black forest cake, banana pancakes, gallons of Ben and jerry ice cream, liquarice, candied popcorn, éclairs, jam doughnuts, cinnamon rolls,croissants,marzipan squares, jelly beans, mash mellows the sweeter they were the better in order to combat the bitter caustic gall that continued to manifest within her, as long as her mouth and taste buds were occupied, the less her mind would ruminate on things left unspoken, so she thought…

The taste of sickly sweetness that had begun with that sticky lollipop eons ago never truly abated the cavernous hole, for what started as a whisper was now a silent scream that lived a hundred times in a day and with it increasing the proportions of her body.

Often we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are, perception staining reality.

Although she had avoided mirrors as much as possible, viewing them as reflector tellers of a soul, and her’s was not a soul she particularly wanted to reflect on. She made herself sick from the worry that God could see all her thoughts, every minute every second and there was nothing she could do about it however much she prayed, pleaded, cleaned she could never be pure enough. One morning she found herself standing stark naked in front of one, stunned she could hardly recognize the behemoth figure staring back at her, she’d been here before a sickly place where she runs into herself, though she tries to discard the shell she is enclosed in while looking for another, she is sick, sick of being sick.  How many mirrors shall she look into? Where does she find herself? For she seemed to have lost herself in a museum, a museum of lost things.

Where had she got to? For the figure that looked back at her now bore little resemblance to the person she thought she was.  Hidden in the extra rings around her belly, her eyes like two dark coals peeking out from the mountainous curves of her cheeks, resembling a dark shade of Santa Claus without the beard, her upper arms wobbly with layers of fat akin to bat wings, the gelatinous thighs that rubbed against each other whenever she took a step causing friction burn that had to be soothed with talcum powder, the thick sausage digits that protruded from both her hands.  Was this the backdrop, the wallpaper of her daily life now?

Though she was approaching her fourteenth year, in the mirror she resembled an over generous figure of an African mother who had already given birth to a significant number of children.

One wonders at what point one’s physiology begins to affect one’s psychology and have such a visceral emotional camouflaged impact. This hence began an allergic reaction to physical education that started in small increments and was added on to the ever growing list of her neurosis and paranoia, anything that threatened to expose her body to the outside world, the skimpy gym skirts and leotards, tennis whites and God forbid the mandatory school swimsuit were all delegated into that pile.

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