Every morning at 1:00 am, she would be woken up from the thump of a digital scale on wheels hitting the door’s metal threshold. As it was pushed and rolled into her stale, dreary room by the nurse, the frail girl would accustom herself to the sudden pause in her failing body’s deep sleep by steadily opening her eyes and lifting herself from the bed. She would then proceed to the bathroom to change from her pink pajamas adorned with the images of bug-eyed kittens to a plain powder-blue hospital gown with a gaping hole in the back. Whenever she finished putting it on, she removed the towel hung on the corners of the mirror to gaze at her reflection. The sight of her fragile body wearing the official uniform of infirmity always caused her heart to shatter just a little. She felt like the prozac she took that was broken into two to make it easier to swallow. Only she couldn't consume the anguish in a fractured twenty milligram capsule.
But no matter how pathetic she looked in the mirror, the girl didn't want to look the way that would put her in a positive direction. So, she would sleep through her sadness. She would drift into a slumber and escape actuality.
The girl was beyond willing to forget about her life. You may think that because of her desire to move past the dread, she hungered for a future that was almost unrecognizable of her current state. However, she wanted to experience comfort and optimism without having to change. She wanted to hold happiness as close to her heart as the adhesive stuck to her chest that helped control the ECG monitor, but she didn't feel like handling herself any differently. But you cannot see improvement without alteration. To this, she was oblivious.
As she would exit bathroom, her feet like ice from standing on the cold tile floor, she prepared herself to come in contact with one of the most scary things she knew: a scale. Her skeletal frame couldn’t even cause it to totter, and her feet couldn't even make a sound as she stepped onto the device… backwards. It was always during that moment, the moment that she stood on the digital deathtrap, that she would feel like she was in the passenger seat of the moments that drove her life. Everything she had a reason to smile about could all be ruined because of whatever two-digit number could possibly appear on the scale. To make her anxiety worse, she had to live without knowing the results on the screen. In order to prevent harmful thoughts and behavior, it was not allowed for her to discover her weight. With her back turned to the quantity, she fought back the urge to move her head and take a peek. The nurse would take out her pen and record the data. The girl believed she was being treated like a science project or a case study. Alas, she was very human- more real than the subconscious being telling her to betray her health.
After the weighing was complete, she would sulk back into the bathroom to put on her pajamas once again. She didn’t care that they were juvenile or too whimsical for her age. Her mother, who slept on the adjacent cot, purchased them for her. Her mother, whose eyes never refrained from tearing up as she caught sight of her daughter in that powder-blue gown with a gaping hole in the back, spent her money to buy something she thought her “baby” would like. Her baby, who was now a young adult, was a sack of bones in a sterile, grey room in the hospital. But the love shared between her and her mother was what ultimately compelled her to change and subdue her mother's distress.
The noise of the scale hitting the metal threshold of the door was a signal for her to perform a task that hurt her mother to watch. It was a burden for the girl, but it was a saving grace for the woman worrying in the uncomfortable collapsible bed that she chose to sleep in to be close to her daughter. Her mom was nearer to her heart than anything. And as the nurse would leave the room each morning, and the clock struck five past one, the girl would try not to forget about her mother’s love as she closed her heavy eyes once more.