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A Gibbous Moon
by Dana Shavin

Part One

The Body Tourist

     I’m in the car when the realization hits me: I could lose weight if I really wanted to. I am eighteen years old and a sophomore at Bard College in upstate New York. I am 5’9” and 132 pounds, ten pounds below what the insurance charts feel I could comfortably weigh. But what the charts don’t see is that I am thin everywhere except in my stomach, which is entirely too round and too thick. Although I have dieted since I was twelve, I have never been able to get rid of it, and I have blamed this soft rolling belly for everything that has gone wrong in my life, including a lack of dates in high school, the reason I am not a better horsewoman, and why I am uncomfortable around other people my age. “Fat” is why my grades are not better and I don’t have more friends, the reason people stare at me on the street and the first thing people register when they meet me. “Fat” is responsible for every success I have not had, every way I have been ignored and marginalized by my family. “Fat” is the reason I fear I will enter adulthood with a lack of self respect that will eventually shatter the brittle façade of my functioning, leaving me just another fat girl with a question on her lips.

      I could lose weight if I really wanted to. It is an old thought that comes to me with a new intensity, like a bird falling out of the sky. I am in the

parking lot of Stereo World in Wappingers Falls, New York. I am waiting for my boyfriend to buy speakers and wondering whether I can skip dinner, whether the apple I am eating will hold me for another seven or eight hours until we go to sleep. I feel for the pudge underneath my shirt. If I can skip dinner, I will wake up in the morning hungry and with a stomach that lies deceptively flat and even caves in slightly between my hipbones. I will be not fat until I eat breakfast, at which time my stomach will round out again, press uncomfortably against my jeans, and announce to the world that I am a glutton. 

     I could lose weight if I really wanted to. The moment the thought comes to me, there is an inexplicable clarity to the realization that I am, and have always been, in control of my weight. That if I really chose to, I could lose weight and actually change the way people think and feel about me. By losing weight I could cure myself of my perpetual discomfort with my body, and in turn, my perpetual dissatisfaction with my life. By the time my boyfriend emerges from Stereo World with a speaker under each arm, my epiphany is fifteen minutes old, and I am anorexic.   END OF EXCERPT