Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro

Author:Josie Shapiro [Shapiro, Josie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

BLACK NOTHINGNESS. A SHIMMERING grey-and-white skeleton, my bones ghostly lines. The pen of the sports specialist dancing along my tibia, my femur. Shattering: here, here, here. Some of the dark lines are fractures as fine as the strands of my hair. His toothy face and black eyes, my heart and stomach dropping away from my body to the floor.

This dream haunted me for years, at first almost weekly, then every few months. Each time I would wake in a fright, my heart racing. It was a dream, of course, so it wasn’t the same as the reality. The reality was crisper, less dramatic — and happened only once. The dream came twenty, maybe thirty times, and my memory was shaded and altered by its impression.

AFTER MY DIAGNOSIS, I MOVED home with Mum. It was like travelling back in time: the same sheets on the bed, the same flickering lightbulb in the kitchen. She paid for me to see a nutritionist and a physiotherapist, never once asking me to pay her back. I ended up staying a year.

The rehabilitation was intense. I went from running 10 kilometres on the track in half an hour to three minutes on the stationary bike: no more than that, said the physio, a spry woman with salt-and-pepper hair. ‘It will take some time to get you back on your feet.’

It did. A full year after my MRI, she said she had some good news. I could slowly ease back into running. ‘Start small,’ she said. ‘Jog for a minute, walk for a minute. Jog, walk, jog, walk. Do that ten times, have a day of rest, and try again. Over time your body will adapt and you’ll be back where you were.’

I didn’t want to run and end up back where I was. I felt humiliated, and I was furious with Daniel, Bruce and Yuri — though mostly I was angry with myself. I’d failed. Everything Teddy had said about me was true — I was lazy. Lazy people don’t run, so I wouldn’t. I put my sneakers away, said goodbye to Bonnie once again, and moved back to Auckland.

I found a room in a dingy house in Henderson with three random flatmates, and accepted a job as a barista at a café in Titirangi called Four Loaves, next door to a garden centre. My weight crept up, 42, 43, and settled around 45 kilograms. Part of me knew this was a healthy weight, a perfectly ordinary weight for someone of my height, but the devil inside me taunted: you’re too fat, you should lose weight.

I sank into a darkness like the black-green river, but now Kent wasn’t there to pull me up the way he had that day I’d plunged in to the depths before I’d learned to swim. There was too much to hold inside — I wanted to split myself open and let it all out. With a pair of scissors I cut open the disposable razor I’d been using to shave my legs.

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