Starving Girl

October 5, 2002
(last edited on April 7, 2006)

She sat up in bed with a start; suddenly, before she had even fully awoken. The drab gray tones of a room lit only by some small amount of moonlight met her eyes for the few moments they were open. She closed them again, tightly, sitting up, leaning forward. She moved her hand over her stomach; she felt the rumbling, the unsettledness. She forced her eyelids to close even tighter. Dampness crept around the corners of her eyes. She held her breath, remaining in that moment, conscious only of the stabbing pain; the phantom knife, violating her abdomen with sadistic glee.

“What’s wrong, baby?” A male voice emanated, groggily, from her side. She recoiled as he reached a tentative arm out for her. “Are you okay?” he weakly asked.

Do I look okay? She wanted to spit the words at him. Why would you even ask something so stupid? Why are you even awake? Instead, she neutrally replied, “Go back to bed.”

Predictably—annoyingly so, she thought—he leaned forward and draped an arm around her, ignoring her exaggerated twist designed to throw his arm off. I don’t want you to see this. You can’t have this. I don’t want you here for this. “Go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked, equally as weak as his earlier question. In a sidelong glance, she noticed the difficulty he was having keeping his eyes open.

“I’ll be fine. Go back to bed.” They sat, side by side, in the gloom of a too-early morning. She moved both of her hands to her stomach, closing her eyes even tighter, and leaned forward. “You’re falling asleep anyway. Go back to bed, Alan.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Go back to bed.” Why can’t you ever say anything else? Why can’t you know what to do?

Despite her stated wishes, he remained by her side, as he himself drifted in and out of consciousness—lowering his head and relaxing his arm around her, then raising it and tightening his hold, again and again. After a period that could have been minutes or hours, his arm began to slide off her shoulders, failing to raise itself again.

She leaned her head forward, noting the pressure all around her forehead. She relaxed her jaw, only now realizing it was clenched. For a few moments, the pain had ceased.

She tried, tentatively, to lie back down. She pushed Alan’s arm away and allowed him to slide back into a more comfortable resting position. With careful movements, she then crept to the far side of her end of the bed, leaning outwards. Having a moment of reflection, she turned and leaned over to kiss the forehead of her evenly-breathing companion. She then turned back to face out on her side of the bed, holding herself in a fetal position, drawing her knees into her chest.

She knew it was not over… her eyes tightened again, as she clung tighter and tighter to the undersides of her knees. Her knuckles turned white; tears again touched her eyes, some of them leaving to stream down her face. Her breathing matched the irregular rhythm of the invisible menace inside her. At times, a sharp pang would hit, surprising her each time, throwing her breathing off.

I would love the feel of your arm right now, she thought, hearing the light noise of regular breathing from behind her. Tears flowed steadily from both of her eyes, crossing her lips with a saline taste. She closed her eyes tighter and tighter, forcing all of the muscles on her face to contract; her lips in a humorless smile, her forehead crinkled, her cheeks painfully full on her face. With her eyelids squeezed so tightly, she saw explosions of white in her otherwise empty field of vision. At these—not the pain, nor the humiliation she felt, but at these all-too-familiar lights—she gasped.

Hell, she thought to herself. Empty, alone… only light.

It was the last conscious thought she held onto that night, before eventually, and mercifully, she drifted off to sleep.