The Difference Between Februaries (Los Angeles)

WRITING BY MARISSA DING

DESIGN BY RAINA PAEPER

Content warning: For resources on disordered eating, see https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/get-involved/nedawareness/resources.

Last February you were clad in the same men’s size 38 slacks and an oversized jacket walking out of the dining hall to the train station just outside of campus hyperfixating on reducing weights filling out bodily figures slimming down silhouettes while the rain mixed with the tears stumbling down your cheeks.

It was windy that day and you watched the train come and go as you shivered and your clothes billowed around you. That jacket was an extra large in the U.S. a size they don’t make in China. You chose this for yourself.

That day was just another day of hiding what you looked like from everyone refusing to call your body a frame because a frame should communicate structure, not formless extremities a frame should uphold the beauty standards you couldn’t help but see yourself in an embarrassment for a culture that discarded sizes like 22 23 24, for an a4 sheet of paper.

Maybe you always kept that shame within you when you started buying shirts that covered your waist your hips your thighs, and you called it “your style.” I just don’t want to define how I present myself with a label, you said. When you started skipping meals and filling downtime with empty calories the taste of low-sodium potato chips stale in your mouth after lunch, it brought back more memories pushing around undercooked rice grains and day-old kale on your plate at the dining hall staring at the mirrors in the library bathroom when you took study breaks fixating on how your body had changed.

A year later it’s raining again. You wear a leather jacket this time so you don’t get drenched, as you walk to the train station contemplate leaving the journey down the rabbit hole behind.

Perhaps things would’ve been the very same if you chose to wear something that dried fast, like polyester. You remember last February your sleeves draping under and around your arms clinging to every inch of you you, crying at the dining hall the fabric soaking up with tears, so wet as if you had just come in from the rain.

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There’s a razor lodged between the rusty pipes, and I’m suddenly seventeen again, staring at it in one hand while groping the cold tile of the shower under the other. I raise it to my skin, squeeze my eyes shut, I know the pain, I prepare for the pain, I am the pain.

My sister’s laughter from the other side of the wall stops me. She’s watching some sitcom that’s tanked in ratings on IMDb. It’s enough for me to trade the razor in my hand for 988 on my phone.

I love someone, so I don’t hate myself.

kitchen bar on a rickety IKEA barstool, staring transfixed at a rectangle of blue light radiation with tears streaming down my face for three hours. I would’ve drifted into a dreamless sleep instead of sitting in a meadow of mold blossoms and lichen petals, listening to guitar chords serenade other Someones with the same doting kindness they have given me, one I once thought that only I received. But I would rather have my heart split in two than feel nothing at all.

How would you fix a hole in the wall?

I’m alone at Hollywood Palladium on Thursday night because no one could believe that somebody like me would like a Japanese rock band.

No, that’s not right. I’m alone because they saved me. Their scrappy lyrics and dramatic riffs made me into a Someone. They made me want to disappear a little bit less, made me feel like there was a place for me here, on this side. For a split second, I thought that even my weight, no matter how unordinary of a speck of dust in the years they’ve been playing, could manage to bruise their shoulders, so small that I became a giant in their presence. Their voice, which sang to everyone, was still so mine that my chest ached with the gravity of my possession.

They made me believe in magic, the magic of when hearts beat together.

Those words shot bullets into my body, and I felt myself being saved over and over again by this music which didn’t know my name nor my face. And I wondered how the whole thing would be different, if only I was a bigger Someone in their eyes.

Maybe in the hole in the wall, that concert would’ve been just another concert. I would’ve slumped in my bed right after I slammed the door to the Uber instead of sitting at my

A) You patch it up with plaster and paint, replace the molding wood and creaking pipes. Just like my mother did.

B) You fill the crevice with soil and water, and plant a small forest. Watch it grow and weave and snarl with branches, filling what was once an abyss with leaves and flowers. Watch it make the mold and moss beautiful. The mold and moss were already beautiful.

Let the hole be a hole. Let it be dirty and ugly and hurtful. Let it ravage you and make you whole.