The Bathroom Mirror

Trigger warning: Depictions of sexual assault and body dysmorphia

Sometimes Ava wished she could step out of her body. To leave her clumsy human flesh on her bed one day and just float away in the wind, dandelion-like. Bone, sinew and bloody tissue sliding off of her like dollops of fatty mayonnaise so that she slips free, in dishabille. She wondered if she might look prettier as a not-human.

Just for a day, it’d be nice. A week, a month, maybe.

“You’re a bit...big, that’s all— it doesn’t matter to me though! Yeah, I’m cool with it— it’s cool.”

She’d asked her friends about it once, and they all agreed - how cool it would be to just not exist? It’d be so much fun. No thick thighs or bloated stomachs or concave chests to wage war with, no aching muscles or drooping eyes. No heartbreak, no pain, no stress.

Being a human, they decided, was irritating, and collectively agreed that reincarnation was therefore the most optimal state of being. They had briefly considered the possibility of becoming ghosts together, before something else caught their seventeen-year-old attention spans and they forgot all about it.

Their words floated back in her mind now as Ava examined herself in the bathroom mirror. Clad in her underwear, her critical eyes scanned her body—calves, thighs, breasts —before settling decisively on the day’s point of order. Her stomach, Ava thought, her stomach was unbearable.

It mocked her in the mirror, this gargantuan expanse of white (white like pus, like infection, like lard), heaving and swelling and growing by the second. Ava watched it pulsating in the mirror, and holding her breath, ran her hands over it. She dropped them in disgust. Texture like bread dough. This simply would not do.

His fingers poked her stomach playfully, and she giggled. He prodded again, harder, and dimly, Ava wondered if it might leave a mark tomorrow. She’d always bruised like a peach.

She’d have to start abdomen exercises tonight then, before the summer started.

Twisting experimentally, she watched, transfixed, as lines creased her lower back in an upended V, wrinkling and collapsing flesh into folds, soft pleats of white skin and flesh and fat. White speckled with pink and red bumps, and tan lines criss-crossing her shoulders like angry caution tape. Warning, warning they said, this is a crime scene; avert your eyes.

His eyes slid away from hers, travelling further down her body. A sort of grin, grimace crossed his face and she felt his hands on her stomach, her back. A red rash worked its way, unnoticed, up her neck.

Like an anatomical diagram, Ava observed herself. She knew the lines that shaped her body- the curves that enclosed the ebb and flow of her flesh into her breasts and back. Straight vectors across her shoulders and down her legs that hemmed her in from the blank space next to her. The notches at the tip of her head and the soles of her feet compressing her, like a mold, into one point seven three metres and sixty-eight kilograms of Ava-pulp.

This was Ava’s safe space; a discreet conversation held between only herself and her body.

It asks her, “What do you want from me? What more do you want from me? What more can you take?”, and she tells it, “Perfection. I want perfection. I want to escape.”

“Ava! Breakfast!”—

and the spell was broken. She stepped out of her bathroom and put on her school uniform. Her blouse buckled and strained in all the wrong places and she thought, again, of floating.

Floating— she was floating above the two of them. Her body, almost incandescent in the dim room, tensing away from his lingering touch. He was almost entirely on top of her now, hands not on her back but her wrists. Her twisting turned into writhing turned into thrashing on the hardwood floor. As she watched, bizarrely detached, the distant thump of party bass faded away and her quiet protest with it, until all Ava could hear was his stale breath at her ear.

“Ava. Ava. Come on. Don’t be like that—relax! It’ll be fine, I swear—”

“Ava— don’t be boring now. Please. Don’t tell me you don’t want this.”

And so her body relaxed and her mouth said, “Yes, of course, sorry”. Far above them, drifting through the ceiling and the roof and into the stars, Ava waited.

Six months later, she could barely remember that boy now. He wasn’t important, and she was certainly not going to be upset by something so trivial. But the more she thought about it, she supposed he had a point. Sure, she looked good, but she could look so much better!

She could eat healthier, exercise more, smile more, until she became the best possible version of herself, until her body was hers and entirely hers again. It was self-actualisation— the poets would call it character development! She would finally be light enough to float.

So Ava kept that memory filed away. Now and then, she pulled it out, re-examined the body lying on the hardwood floor that night. She needed to kill it, she thought, to escape it. To laugh in the face of the stupid boy who thought that he could have her and say, “Not a chance in hell. You don’t deserve me.”

But for now, Ava wore bone and sinew and bloody tissue like fetters, and her bathroom mirror a prison.