Eclipsed

Copyright 2005 © Abigail Ronck

“Light Me Up and Blow Me Out”

I am six years old—looking up—and the ceiling is spinning. Spinning right into white linoleum and frantic feet, right into where I am lost in the supermarket, desperately searching for my mother and her shopping cart, or any other form of familiarity or comfort. I’m scared because I can’t remember my last name or my phone number. I can’t remember who I am.

When I turn eight, I remember. I am the leggy girl who sweats at recess and runs the 50-yard dash faster than any mama’s boy in the third grade. All the boys give me high fives and invite me to play kick ball with them. I am lead off batter for my team because I am the best at finding holes in the defense. I’m a sure thing when it comes to making it to first base.

It’s dusk and I am nine years old. I am riding my pink bike (no helmet) down a steep incline, tearing through the warm summer sky and all of its magenta wind.

To my left—the last remnants of purplish sunlight; to my right, climbing in the sky, a sliver of an invisible temperate moon. And I don’t quite know where I find it, but somewhere in between, I take in a breath of air so fresh that it can be made of nothing else but a trace of His ether. It quivers and seizes me until a sudden, unidentifiable flicker of splendor and freedom ignites, and bounds throughout me. I stop my bike and put my foot on the pavement. I am young, but not too young to realize that I will spend the rest of my life searching for moments like this.

Now that I am 11, I spend less time outside. Black boots with two-inch heels are in fashion, and for the first time in my life, I desperately want a pair. My mom won’t buy them for me though; she says at the rate I wear through my sneakers she can’t afford ‘extraneous’ shoes. I look up the word extraneous in the dictionary. Then I give my bike to my little sister.

At 12 years old, Brian bumps into my friend Allison in the hallway between classes and yells out, ‘OW’—dramatically. Then he tells his friends he didn’t see the brick wall in front of him. They all laugh, so she smiles along with them even though she doesn’t get it. Neither, really, do I.

I look in the bathroom mirror late nights, naked, when the whole house is sleeping. My body, everything about it, is horrifying. My arms are still gangly and long, a serious mismatch with my developing hips and thighs. Every limb looks detached, foreign somehow, and I don’t know which I’m supposed to love or hate. It has come time for paper fashion dolls of our pasts to give way to the three dimensional Barbies of the future, long limbed and shapely, with wardrobes and occupational capabilities of unsurpassed adaptability—all of this and only 11 ½” tall.

Am I ready? Ready to go even bigger than this requiem of plastic dreams and blonder hair? The longer I stare back at myself, the more the features blur together into one amorphous entity. Into her—celebrity, one woman dynasty. Into outwardly glamorous affairs with men like Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, Happy Birthday Mr. President, and the same to be wished to the other jocks of the high school hallways. To be endlessly fascinating and famous, to nurture a perpetual love affair with public image. No sleep, never alone.

To belong. To tranquilize and shorten my skirt to make it all easier, let it blow up—white—into the wind, and to smile all the while. To be seen. To live in a high school Hollywood where they’ll pay you a million dollars for your smile and fifty cents for your soul. To be inside.

I am 15 and I read Seventeen magazine. And Cosmopolitan, too. If I looked up the definition of every word I didn’t know the meaning of, as my mom suggests, I would probably still be too young to recognize the arrogance of the magazine’s title. Cosmopolitan: to be pertinent or common to the whole world. They don’t want you to think about it, anyways. Like if you enter already captured and drowning maybe you won’t realize that it’s what you’re swimming in that won’t let you breathe.

Take in a huge amount of air. Here it comes.

What’s sexy this second? Red lipcolor, like a tattoo on your lips. News flash: how to score perfect skin. Armani mania. Anti-aging cream. Fragrances. Estee lauder: defining beauty. Cover girl: 85 shades + 19 formulas = your perfect skin tone match.  Virginia slims. Happily ever after. Split ends. Guess model…the jeans are inconsequential. Michelob Ultra, lose the carbs. Not the taste. Have your coffee black and your teeth white. Have work done on the cells of your skin. Triple action moisturizer. What will he think when he sees you naked?  Fall’s hippest accessories: colorful tweeds, velvet bags, fur, shrunken cardigans, fuller lips, smoother hair, high cheek bones, thighs narrower than your knees. 184 pages of advertisements telling you why he doesn’t love you yet. Finally…another breath.

This summer I’m 17 years old and back to riding a bike for many hours a day. It reminds me of when I was younger, except it’s stationary, indoors, and burns 500 calories an hour. Every spin of the pedals is a stronger fight to go back. It’s a fight to regress—from Barbie back to her paper doll predecessor. I’m sweating, exhausted, just so tired. And not just from riding the bike. I’m tired of the race to be noticed…always, every day. I begin to forget that it is my privilege to take up space in the world. So I’m sinking in…to myself. Fading away into an anguished, but somehow more peaceful anonymity. One achieved through self-destruction. And I won’t realize that until years later, when I read this—the words of Abra Fortune Chernik: She was “a woman held up by her culture as the physical ideal because she was starving, self-obsessed and powerless, a woman called beautiful because she threatened no one except herself.”

I am 19, and in some strange way, it’s like I have come full circle. It’s like I’m in the grocery store again, with the ceiling spinning, but this time there is no one here to find me. I’m at a party, alone at the end of aisles and aisles of drunken bodies, and I can’t remember who I am.

So tonight, when I get home, no matter how late it is, I will call my mom and yell at her. She’ll listen without speaking as she always does, because she knows how to console and bury my anger into her silent presence. Tonight, I’ll cry to her about how there’s this one great irony, this idiotic tragedy in every girl’s life, and it is this: that they all start telling you to “just be yourself” moments after you have slipped away into the distance of future, head swiveled, hands grasping backwards—just moments after you have forgotten who that used to be.

About how they never told me that when I used to spend evenings by myself, on the seat of my bicycle, and never once felt lonely. Or when I yelled dirty words across the playground like all the boys. I never heard it before I stopped wearing white shirts to school because I didn’t want my bra straps to show through. Or even before I stopped running so fast, and slowed down, to stand in front of mirrors, bleeding…and stinging…and starving. No one ever told me to be myself before I got here—thrust into this heart-pumping, teeth-grinding, tank-top and high-heel wearing moment.  Here—standing alone and invisible against the yellowish wallpaper, soaked in fraternity haze, trying to distinguish my thoughts from the vulgarity of the music’s pulsating lyrics, all the while searching for myself among the sea of bodies. Is that really me blending into that faded wall? I can’t quite see anymore. And if it’s not me, slowly, methodically, disappearing, then I wonder if maybe it’s you instead.